5 Costly Organization Mistakes (and how to avoid them)!

Organizing your home is a never ending thing at our home and sometimes things get out of hand. Sometimes organization mistakes can end up costing you money and we want to avoid money loss at all cost! Here are a few organization mistakes that can end up costing you money and how to avoid them!

Not Keeping Your Mail in Check – I think we all can agree that mail is a nightmare. Junk mail especially….. why they send that stuff I will never know! So just how do you keep your mail in check? In our house we use the one touch policy when it comes to mail. When I pick up the mail (mine still comes to the house in a cute little slot in the door….. love it!) anyway… when I pick up the mail I am touching it. Since we have the one touch policy it means I have to do something with it now. I walk straight into my kitchen near the trash and I start going through it. Junk goes in the trash, bills to be paid goes in the bill paying bin, hubbies stuff goes in his pile (he is only allowed to touch it once also) and things that need to be filed get filed NOW! I really love having an mail organizer near by to keep min in check. This will keep you from losing things and ending up paying fees on late bills. Nobody wants to lose money that way!

Buying Organizational Products you Have NO Room For – Boy this is a biggy for me! I am in the store and those organizational shelves, bins, baskets and containers just call my name. Finding the right products for your home takes more thought than Oh boy!! How cute!! I have stopped myself from making impulse purchases that can put a real ding in the pocket book. I only by things when I need them. When I do decide I am needing to organize an area I take dimensions of the area it is going to need to be stored in, and a list of items that I am trying to organize. This will save you loads of money in the end. Often times those impulse buys don’t end up working out and you waste you money……along with wasting your valuable storage space!! Now you have to store the items that were meant to store something!! UUUuugh! It’s a vicious cycle!

Hoarding Toys in Cute Little Bins – Hmmmm now what is the problem here??? Well let me tell ya!! Having way to many toys can be very overwhelming for a child and costly on the budget. Toy bins need to be clearly labeled and easy to get to for your child. Having a perfect looking room is great but… if they can’t get to their toys it does no good. Toys cost money and when we pick up every little thing that we think our child needs then we are throwing money out the window. Let me tell ya a little secret…. kids might like toys and they do learn from them but really do they need them all?? Grab your kids and take them outside and show them how to play in the outdoors just like we used to when we were kids. 🙂 You won’t need quite so many toys and can skip getting 1,000 bins to keep them in. There is really something to be said about keeping it simple.

 Not Keeping a Pantry Inventory – So you pantry is supreme looking…something right out of an organization magazine! What good does that do you when you are at the store doing your grocery shopping and your picking up flour because you are just not sure. Wasting money on food that you don’t need is just down right annoying. Especially when you get home and you now have two backups of flour and no place to put it! Not keeping an inventory will lead to wasting money on unwanted food and it will mess up your pretty little cabinets with food that may some day go bad because you don’t have time to eat it all. Take the time to start an inventory and keep track of it. You will learn to love it, I promise!

Having Permanent Labels on Kitchen Items –  So you have your kitchen all nice and organized and you have some fancy labels on everything and it looks so nice and pretty. Um…. ya, I hate to be the one to break it to you but I have already been down that road and everyone might as well learn from my mistakes. Permanent labels work well on let’s say flour and sugar but not so well on other things like snacks and chips. The problem is that your family may be eating loads of these goodies at this moment but in a few months you will not have so much luck. It seems that some food will make it’s debut in your home and then it will soon fizzle out and you will be left with containers that just don’t work anymore. Instead of using the pretty labels invest in some that you can change. It will be well worth the hassle over time. We really like chalk board labels in our house and use them everywhere.