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Americans have a lot of stuff with plenty of places to store it.
Some surveys report that nearly 40% of the population uses a self-storage service. Although, not everyone pays to put their things in a storage space. Just 1 in 10 Americans rent storage space, which is a $154 billion industry. Overall, Americans spend over $10 billion a year on off-site storage.
Tracy McCubbin, CEO and founder of dClutterfly, says there's no amount of storage space that can save us and all of our stuff at this point.
"We are at a point where we are dealing with what we refer to as the silver tsunami," McCubbin explained.
People are living longer and therefore have more time to acquire stuff and then pass it on to their kids or other family members. All of a sudden, your house is cluttered with things.
McCubbin says in her two decades of experience, there are very few occasions though where storage units are used by someone consistently and ultimately worth the expense.
"I have never been in one where it has been worth the money that they paid to store," McCubbin said. "In two decades, not a single client has ever had anything in those storage units worth more than they paid to store it."
Another critical factor in why Americans assume so much stuff is the fact that it's so easy to shop nowadays.
"We're in a combination of it's super easy to buy things and we're being marketed to 24 hours a day," said McCubbin.
This may be hard to believe but the average American home has 300,000 items in it. Since we love to buy things and hold of to them, homes and garages are becoming full of stuff, with a lot of it not always necessary or needed.
Once that dopamine hit wears off after a brand new purchase, Americans tend to want to get it back and buy something else, adding to the eventual clutter that's in the home.
"We're all stressed out and buying things make us feel better and then when that feeling wears off we think we need to buy something else to feel better again," McCubbin said. "It's sort of this vicious cycle that we're all in."
Half of Americans say they have at least one room in their home that they believe is “unsalvageable” with clutter. Plenty of studies suggest that having too much stuff in your home is bad for your health. McCubbin suggests trying what she does for a living...decluttering.
"When you have too much stuff, your house stops working smoothly," she said. "What I say about being organized and decluttered in your home is that 'it's not for your house to look perfect, it's for your house to work for you.'"