Your Clutter Is Costing More Than You Think - Your Money Briefing
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Ariana Aspuru: Hey, Your Money Briefing listeners. This is Ariana Aspuru. Here at YMB, we're all about bringing you important personal finance and career news. We're working on making some changes to our personal finance content and we want to hear from you. Our question today is, what personal finance topics do you want to hear more about? Stocks, bonds and markets, housing and mortgages, taxes, financial goals, or something else? If you're listening on Spotify, look for our poll under the episode description, or you can send us an email to ymb@wsj.com. That's ymb@wsj.com. Now, onto the show. Here's Your Money Briefing for Friday, April 11th. I'm Ariana Aspuru for The Wall Street Journal. If you're in spring cleaning mode, you might be wondering, "How in the world did I get all this stuff?" WSJ reporter Dalvin Brown found that it's not just you; Americans are drowning in their own stuff.
Dalvin Brown: I tend to buy things because I forgot I bought it already. But we're not just accumulating. That's what's really interesting to me. We're duplicating. We're buying more of what we already have.
Ariana Aspuru: We'll hear more from Dalvin about why it's costing you more than you think. Stick around after the break. Americans buy a crazy amount of cheap stuff, but it's costing us. Wall Street Journal reporter Dalvin Brown joins me. Dalvin, let's start off. How big of an issue is our clutter problem?
Dalvin Brown: It has reached crisis proportions, and I mean that. I found that it's not just about a cluttered closet anymore or a cluttered drawer. It's about entire rooms being dedicated to storage. About 21% of people use over 500 square feet for storage, which is the size of a two car garage. And as one professional organizer told me, we're battling a tsunami of stuff and the stuff is winning.
Ariana Aspuru: From your story, which listeners can find in our show notes, I gather that people are buying more, moving more, and losing more of their own stuff. Walk me through how that's all happening.
Dalvin Brown: Yeah. So it is a perfect storm created by ease of acquisition. So how easy it is to buy things, and then the difficulty of disposal. Online shopping and social media have made buying things really frictionless. So a few taps on your phone, something arrives at your door. A lot of people don't even remember what they ordered and then it just shows up at their door. But getting rid of those things requires physical and emotional labor, and that's really taxing. So what's fascinating is how this cycle sort of feeds itself. People buy things, then they run out of space, so then they buy more organizational things to manage the things. And as one of my sources told me, "I am buying things just to manage my things." U-Haul even had to increase the size of its largest trucks by 60% over the past 10 years. I was shocked when the company told me that. And it's basically to accommodate Americans' growing volume of possessions.
Ariana Aspuru: And one of the things you mentioned in your story, that honestly made me laugh a little bit, is how many people buy more things because they just forget that they already have this one thing and they can't find it.
Dalvin Brown: Yes. Yes, exactly. So 71% of Americans in a recent survey, that's the bulk of us, buy things that we already own because we can't find the other thing because we've hidden it somewhere in our homes from ourselves. I, like you, Richard, I tend to buy things because I forgot I bought it already. But we're not just accumulating. That's what's really interesting to me. We're duplicating. We're buying more of what we already have.
Ariana Aspuru: There's so much interesting data that you bring up in your story. What was the most striking number about Americans habits that you found?
Dalvin Brown: In 2024, Americans bought 5.7 times more flatware and dishes compared to 1994. So three decades ago, people had a lot less stuff just in their kitchen. And that's not a small increase. That's nearly six times what previous generations purchased. We're also buying 3.5 times more furniture, 2.5 times more clothing and footwear compared to 30 years ago.
Ariana Aspuru: And it's not like I'm having 5.7 times more people over my house that I need all these dishes for or all this furniture for.
Dalvin Brown: Exactly. And we don't have five or six times more space in our homes to put things. So we're fitting multiple more possessions into roughly the same square footage. And it's no wonder that another number that came up for me was that downsizing a home now takes about 40 hours, which is double what it took a decade ago.
Ariana Aspuru: And this all makes so much sense. But Dalvin, we now have constant access to low-cost products from places like Temu and SHEIN. Is it just that we can't help ourselves when we see something that's just that cheap?
Dalvin Brown: I also spoke to some psychologists who did say that when prices fall below a certain threshold, it impacts our decision-making processes fundamentally. One source in my story said, "You see something cool and it costs $6, then you think, why not?" The mental calculation shifts from, "Do I need this?" to, "why wouldn't I get this?" And then you end up with more stuff in your home than you probably need.
Ariana Aspuru: Looking ahead and looking at the news, we're talking a lot about tariffs now. How might these heavy import taxes on foreign goods by the Trump administration impact this clutter we're talking about in our own lives?
Dalvin Brown: While the clutter issue has been a thing for years now, one of the things that pushes this conversation forward is the fact that the Treasury Secretary recently stated that access to low-cost goods is not the essence of the American dream. And that signals a policy shift away from prioritizing cheap imports. If tariffs significantly increase prices, they might also slow the influx of inexpensive goods. So if tariffs make the things more expensive, then people might not buy as much. However, tariffs do not address the mountains of stuff that we already have. So that legacy will remain. We'll be dealing with the consequences of that for years. Things may become more expensive to get, but some of the economists I talked to said that people just may change the way that they do consume or where they're getting their goods from.
Ariana Aspuru: Let's say someone wants to declutter; they're listening and taking this as their sign. What are some cost-effective ways of getting rid of some items you might not need?
Dalvin Brown: In my story I start with estate sales, because in some way that is the best way to get rid of a lot of stuff in one fell swoop. And you'd hire someone, they take 35 to 50% of the proceeds, and they let strangers just come in and buy your stuff within a couple of days, or they list it online. The Facebook Marketplace and OfferUps of the world let you directly handle it and sell it to other people. The most important advice from professionals is to try to prevent the accumulation in the first place.
Ariana Aspuru: Yeah, trying to turn off the tap rather than buckets of scooping water out.
Dalvin Brown: Yeah. I mean, I have this rule that whatever comes in my house, I forget it sometimes, but I'm like, "Oh, one item in, one item out." I should probably do one item in, two items out. But I think that mechanism works for me.
Ariana Aspuru: That's WSJ reporter Dalvin Brown. And that's it for Your Money Briefing. Tomorrow we'll have our weekly markets wrap up, What's News in Markets. And then on Sunday, catch the last episode of our three-part series, Buying a Home in 2025: Navigating the Crunch. This episode was produced by me. I'm your host, Ariana Aspuru. Jessica Fenton and Michael LaValle wrote our theme music. Our supervising producer is Melony Roy. Aisha Al-Muslim is our development producer. Scott Saloway and Chris Zinsli are our deputy editors. And Philana Patterson is the Wall Street Journal's Head of News Audio. Thanks for listening.
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All three men were national and international icons whose assassinations — and the theories swirling around them — became the stuff of books, movies, controversy, and the pages of history itself. More: Trump's release of assassination docs opens window into nation's most debated mysteries What's in the King files? The newly released records come from the FBI's investigation of the King assassination, records the Central Intelligence Agency deemed related to the assassination and a file from the State Department on the extradition of James Earl Ray, who pleaded guilty in 1969 to murdering King. David Barrett, a historian at Villanova University, said the files will likely contain new, interesting information. But as was the case with the JFK files released in March, the material likely isn't groundbreaking. "I'm not seeing anything that strikes me as surprising," said Barrett, author of multiple books on presidents and intelligence agencies. "Unless they want to write about the investigation, I don't know that this will have an impact on the scholarship." Noteworthy in the files, Barrett said, are details concerning how the FBI connected Ray to King, how they found him and extradited him back to the U.S. from the United Kingdom, where he had fled. "It does take weeks to go through these, so there might be some important revelatory things but I doubt it," said the political science professor. "It's not exactly what people were hoping for and not what the King family was fearing." Many of the files are also illegible due to age and digitization. Archives officials said the agency was working with other federal partners to uncover records related to the King assassination and that records will be added to the website on a rolling basis. 'Now, do the Epstein files': MLK's daughter knocks Trump over records release What's not in the King files? Not among the newly released documents are details of FBI surveillance into King that historians say could include recordings agency director J. Edgar Hoover hoped to use as blackmail against the Georgia preacher. Experts say Hoover's wiretappings of King's hotel rooms, which are believed to contain evidence of infidelity, are likely what his family fears being made public. The New York Times reported the recordings remain under seal pursuant to a court order until 2027. But UC Berkeley professor Cohen said the documents likely haven't been revealed for multiple reasons. "There's claims that these are major government secrets and so whatever they might contain might be true and that's not the case," Cohen said. "Any large-scale government investigation often includes all sorts of spurious claims, hearsay evidence, things of which there's no truth and part of the reason why they get withheld is bureaucratic inertia and also the need to check their veracity." What does the FBI have to hide? Hoover's recordings might also prove a double-edged sword for the FBI, according to Cohen: "Will these files contain things that will upset the King family? That's possible. But they'll also likely reveal just how massively the FBI violated King's civil liberties." FBI agents began monitoring King in 1955, according to researchers at Stanford University. Hoover believed King was a communist and after the Georgia preacher criticized the agency's activities in the Deep South in 1964, the original FBI director began targeting King using the agency's counterintelligence program COINTELPRO, Stanford researchers said. COINTELPRO was a controversial program that a 1975 U.S. Senate investigation slammed, saying: "Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity," the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities said in its final report. "The Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association." The agency went so far as to send King a recording secretly made from his hotel room that an agent testified was aimed at destroying King's marriage, according to a 1976 U.S. Senate investigation. King interpreted a note sent with the tape as a threat to release recording unless King committed suicide, the Senate report said. MLK assassinated in Memphis, April 4, 1968 The official story of how King died is that he was killed on the balcony outside his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968. He stepped outside to speak with colleagues in the parking lot below and was shot in the face by an assassin. James Earl Ray, a 40-year-old escaped fugitive, later confessed to the crime and was sentenced to a 99-year prison term. But Ray later tried to withdraw his confession and said he was set up by a man named Raoul. He maintained until his death in 1998 that he did not kill King. The recanted confession and the FBI's shadowy operations under J. Edgar Hoover have sparked widespread conspiracy theories over who really killed the civil rights icon. King's children have said they don't believe Ray was the shooter and that they support the findings of a 1999 wrongful death lawsuit that found that King was the victim of a broad conspiracy that involved government agents. Department of Justice officials maintain that the findings of the civil lawsuit are not credible. Read the MLK files Looking to read the MLK files yourself? You can find them on the National Archives' website here. Most of the files are scans of documents, and some are blurred or have become faint or difficult to read in the decades since King's assassination. There are also photographs and sound recordings.
