We’re talking spring cleaning today. This advice has nothing to do with money, at least not on the surface. In this video, I’m going to teach a process for spring cleaning the areas where you live and work. The purpose is not to further procrastinate on handling your finances, but to give you a primer on organizing skills — skills that carry over into organizing your finances. Let’s get to it!

TRANSCRIPT:

If you know that you need to get your finances organized but have been putting it off or don’t really know where to start, this is the video for you.

The purpose of this video is to give you a plan and a framework for where to begin so that we can finally get going on this. The first thing I want you to know is that what I’m about to suggest has nothing to do with money or your finances per se. The reason I’m recommending a way to get started on organizing your finances but has nothing to do with money is because people often find that dealing with finances feels totally overwhelming and difficult. So you’re going to learn an approach to organization that helps you get comfortable with the organization part, and then once you understand how it works, you plug money into it.

So I recommend that you start by cleaning out a space you live or work in that is currently disorganized – so that can be your closet, bathroom, office, car, garage. Any space that is currently cluttered and chaotic. Where if you cleaned that out, you would breathe an audible sigh of relief. I’ve got a specific way that I want you to go about this, and it will serve as a blueprint for how I recommend that you organize your finances.

Start by taking out everything from the space that you’re organizing. Remove literally everything that’s not attached to a wall or the floor. For the purpose of this video, I’m going to use the example of organizing a bathroom. The first step would be to take everything out from in the shower, to the drawers, the area under your sink, any other shelf or surface space, and even the floor rugs.

In order to make this practical, you’ll probably want to start earlier in the day so you can have your bathroom put together again by the same night. So find a place that’s momentarily going to be overrun with bathroom items and put them all there. Yes, another space of yours is temporarily going to be a disaster zone but I promise that this is worth it. You can throw everything into boxes or bins and put it into its temporary holding space. You don’t need to go through everything or make any decisions right now on what’s staying or going, just literally only think about getting everything out, out, out.

Next up, we’re going to give this blank canvas of a bathroom, a top to bottom scrub. Grab your cleaning supplies and clean off all the dust, dirt, grime that you can from the walls, shelves, inside your drawers and vanity, and the floor. I know that the thought of this might not be exciting but once you’re done, you will feel an amazing difference in the space.

When your space is all nice and clean, grab a couple clean cloths and a trash bag. Go sit down in the temporary holding space where all your bathroom items are currently hanging out. One at a time, pick up each item and clean or dust it off. While you’re doing that, and this is truly important, I want you to think about how this item or product has served you and how grateful that you are for it. If you have a hard time being grateful, that’s a good sign that you should throw it out and not get it again.

If you are cleaning a product that you love and notice that you’re running low on it, grab your phone, open up the notes app or wherever you keep lists so that you can create a list of items that need to be re-purchased. If you pick up something that’s old or expired, toss it and decide whether it goes on the repurchase list or not. Put everything that’s been cleaned into a separate pile from the items that have not yet been dusted off.

Like I said, this step, of not just cleaning but feeling gratitude for each thing is where I think you’ll get to experience the life changing magic of tidying. Not sure if that’s what Marie Kondo meant in her book The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up, but this is the part where I think the magic sets in. If we were following Marie’s method, it would be at this point, where you hold each item that you ask yourself if this thing sparks joy in you or not.

This may or may not work for you, I’m a little bit more practical so I’m not going to toss away dental floss just because it doesn’t spark joy – I understand that it’s helpful in supporting my dental and overall health so I’m going to keep it even though on a feeling level it doesn’t do much for me. The point is here to hold each item on its own, clean it, appreciate it, and set it aside into a new pile or the trash.

If you’re not sure if you should keep or toss something, just hang onto it at this point. Right now you can just throw out the things you know are definitely ready to be tossed. Alright, at this point you may want to take another brief break and come back when you’re ready for the next step.

So at this juncture you have a laid out pile of all your bathroom items. Now it’s time to group them together by category or by function. So everything that you use in the shower gets put into one group, all of your makeup goes in another group – if you want bonus points, you can even break down makeup into sub categories like eyes, lips, and face for example. You can have a group for hair, body, facial skincare, nails but it’s really up to you.

You can break them down into categories based on when you use items, like you can have a group of items that you use in the morning and another group of things you use in the evenings. This part is really a matter of personal preference. So now your giant pile is separated out into sub piles of these bathroom categories.

Now it’s time to go through the items in each category and see what should be tossed. You might see that you have redundant items, or realize that you just no longer like or use a certain product. You can see an item that you’ve held onto forever, thinking that some day you would use it but months or years later that day has never come and probably never will. This is definitely a practice of letting things go that don’t serve you, and that’s probably something that will help you all across your life.

So now you’ve got your categories cleaned out so that only the good stuff remains. Now is time for some thinking and planning with respect to your space, in this case the bathroom, and where things will live. You are finding a home for each of these categories. Any new items that you buy in this category will join this drawer, or part of the draw, or space in a cabinet or shelf. You’re going to keep the items in each category together in a place they fit and are functional for you.

So think of how much space each category takes and where might be a good place for it. Don’t put anything away yet, we’re in a design phase, just thinking about how the space will stay organized and functional for your life. For example, you might put a category of items that you don’t use often in a lower drawer since you don’t need to get to it as often. Before you put things away into their new space, figure out what containers you could use to keep things organized.

So the idea is not to clean everything out and then throw it in a drawer where it’s eventually going to get all mixed together and you won’t be able to clearly see what you have. So think of containers, and drawer organizers, and maybe even under the sink shelving to be able to utilize vertical space. Measure drawers and spaces so that you know what you’re looking for and then go and get containers that will keep things in their space.

You want to give each category a home. This also makes it easy to find things that you don’t commonly use. For example, in your bathroom if you have a medication and first aid category, then even if you don’t remember exactly where your band-aids are, you know where the medication and first aid categories live and so you know that you’ll find it if you look there.

It might occur to you as strange that someone who should be encouraging you to spend less money is actually telling you to go out and spend money, but this does make sense, I promise. First, I don’t believe in reducing all spending, just wasteful spending. And I also believe that taking care of the items that money purchases for you deserves to be taken care of and respected. I believe in taking care of your money and taking care of the things that money buys you. So this is smart spending, I mean unless you’re going out and buying gold drawer dividers or something ridiculous like that.

These organization items do not need to be expensive, although I get that everything feels expensive right now. You can get these kinds of items from organization stores, like the Container Store, and office supply stores, as well as discount stores. So think of what kind of container you need for each category. You can figure out if a closed container is best (as it probably is for jewelry so it doesn’t get dusty) or whether you want a basket for items such as your hair appliances. Get these containers and place all the items in their container. Then put all the containers into there new space in your bathroom. And voila! You’re done!

When you finish, you will have feelings of relief and clarity, your energy will shift. You will enjoy being in your bathroom more. You will feel proud of yourself and so glad that you went through the temporary work and discomfort of cleaning it out. This will be the motivation you need to tackle your finances.

Finances for most people are scarier than bathrooms but what the bathroom clean out provides is a framework and practice for organizing your money. Organizing your finances will work similarly although obviously not exactly the same. And the feeling that you get after will be just as, if not more, satisfying.

So be sure to catch my next video which shows you how to apply the experience and lessons learned in cleaning out your bathroom to organizing your money – it’s financial spring cleaning, if you will. See you there!