 What do sunk costs have to do with cleaning out your closets? It's a great question and we get to talk about it today. Hi there, I'm Angela Brown and this is Ask a House Cleaner. This is a show where you get to ask a house cleaning question and I get to help you find an answer. We're helping a woman clean out her closet and she's going to move. One of the closets she has, she says, you can just pack up everything in that closet. It goes straight to the storage unit. I said, well, wait a second. What's in there? She said, I don't know. I haven't looked in there in about 10 years and I said, whoa, so you're telling me that none of the stuff that's in that closet you use and she said none of it, like none of it at all. Like maybe a couple of times a year, none of it at all. So for 10 years, this closet has not been opened. All right, so now we're going to take the stuff that's in that closet and we're going to go put it in a storage unit and we're going to pay to store it again. Whoa, let's stop for just a second and talk about sunk costs. Sunk costs is a financial term and what it means is you've spent money on something and the money is gone and you can't return the item and so the item is what it is. And if you haven't used it in a long time, that's a sunk cost. So you hanging on to it for longer doesn't make it more valuable because unless you're going to sell it and you're keeping it as a collector's item, then you're storing it and then paying for a storage unit is sunk costs, right? That's now silly costs to pay off sunk costs, right? So that we can warehouse and store things that we don't need, want or use. So as we open the door of her closet, what we found were lots and lots of special occasion shoes. Now, what is a special occasion shoe? I brought about 30 pair of them with me to the studio here today and there are shoes like this, right? They have a fancy heel. They have a fancy design. They're so fancy, in fact, that she never wanted to wear them more than once because people would recognize the shoe and say, we saw you wore that before. Yes, but it's still a good shoe, right? So many of the shoes she has were worn only once. We actually found shoes that still had the packaging inside of them and the stickers on them. They'd never been worn at all. And so she had all these shoes that she was then going to send to a storage unit and just keep paying to store. And I said, do you have any interest at all in selling these? And she said, no, they're not very valuable. They just look fancy. Okay, are you going to wear them again at any time? And she said, probably not. She said, I haven't had any special occasions that I've gone to since I changed jobs about 15 years ago. And well, wait a second, what's happening in the future? She said, well, I've quit that job and I'm now only doing Zoom calls. So she won't even be wearing the special occasion shoes at the Christmas party this year that they're doing on Zoom. So do you need all these shoes? And she said, I don't need any of them at all. I don't use them. I'll probably never wear them again. Whoa, why are we taking them to a storage unit? And she said, well, quite frankly, I don't know. I hate to get rid of them because they cost some good money. And she's taken impeccable care of the shoes. They were all in plastic shoeboxes. Out of the dust, they were free environments getting in there and chewing on the shoes or whatever. And she's taking great care of the shoes. But the reality is it sunk costs if she's never going to wear those shoes again. With the sunk costs concept, we then went through every closet of her house and we discovered that there were pairs of jeans. She had 30, 40, 50 pairs of jeans that were several sizes too small that she paid good money for that she hadn't gotten rid of. And they too were going to go to the storage unit because why, right? So when we walked through the conversation of it all, she's never going to wear those either. She paid good money for them, but those are sunk costs. Now I want to stop for just a second and ask you, what do you have that are sunk costs? If we were to go into your closets right now, are there clothes or shoes or bathrobes? I know some people have lots of bathrobes. I don't know why, but every Christmas maybe they get a new one. And so they have that one from this Christmas, the one from the Christmas before, the one from the Christmas before. And now they have 14, 15 bathrobes in their house, but they can only ever wear one at a time. And even if one is in the laundry and they wear the other one, that's like two bathrobes. And then you recycle them and wash them and you've got 14, 15 extra bathrobes that you're never going to use. Do you see where I'm headed with this? Okay, so I want you to stop and think about what do you have that you're hoarding or that you're saving or that you're storing or that you're protecting that are sunk costs? And I want you to go through your closets. We've been on a 30-day purge and that's why we're getting calls right now. As people are calling us and they're saying, hey, I want to top off the 30-day purge and I want to go through all my closets or we're moving and I want to go through all the closets. Can you help us pack some stuff up? Can you help us get rid of some stuff? The reality is, yes, if you have items that we're going to call sunk cost items, now is the time to get rid of those. Now is the time to donate them, to give them away, to sell them on eBay, to sell them on Marketplace, to sell them on Nextdoor. There are a lot of opportunities to get rid of the stuff that are sunk costs for you. But to save them is going to just consume more of your space. And if you're going to send them to a storage unit, that's going to cost more money, which we now call silly money, to store the sunk costs. Right? It's crazy. I just want you to be aware of it because it is a concept that can destroy your closet space. Right? So, as we finish our 30-day purge, let's go through and get rid of all the sunk costs that are in our closets and in our homes. Alrighty. I hope this helps you a little bit. If it does, please pass this on to a friend. Leave your comments in the notes below because we would love to have this conversation and continue it and hear your tips and ideas and strategies as well. Until we meet again, leave the world a cleaner place than when you found it.