Little by little I am giving stuff away.  You have heard my mantra:  You want it in your twenties; you charge it in your thirties; you pay it off in your forties; you wonder why in the world you ever bought it in your fifties; and you get rid of it in your sixties.  Stuff.  Someone asked me what I bought at the estate sale that I worked last week.  The answer was, "Nothing."  Even when it went to half price on the last day.  I walked through eight rooms stuffed to the gills with everything you could imagine and didn't find a single thing.  Nada.

Most of what people buy is because someone else bought it.  So we want it too.  We want to keep up with the Joneses??  I got over wanting to have a new car in my late twenties.  At the time, I didn't know much about buying used cars--but Ken was an expert at it.  We were both driving a car to work, both of us driving 120 miles round trip every day.  For two cars that equals 240 miles a day.  It adds up in a hurry.  The savings in buying cars three, or four, sometimes five years old, was tremendous.  Find something with low mileage, put eighty or ninety thousand more miles on it, sell it and buy another similar bargain.  But for some people, a new is an emotional necessity.  To be honest, I don't get it.  Let someone else take that first and second year depreciation.

I pretty much feel the same about clothes.  I am a garage sale nut.  And in Edmond, you can find about anything you want--with the original tags still on it--on any Friday (garage sale day) of the month.  People buy things, never wear them, gain weight (?) or receive stuff they don't want as a gift and put it in a garage sale for two or three dollars.  My cousin Ann and I go "garage sale-ing" every Friday.  It's a blast.  The ultimate Easter egg hunt.

It's not that I won't pay full price for things I might really, really want, it's just that I can't seem to justify it.  I'd rather give money away than spend it on something full price in a department store.  I am a true, dyed in the wool bargain hunter.  You might think "cheapskate?"  But no, I am not stingy.  I just think that if I pay five dollars for something that cost someone else a hundred dollars--I win.  People who don't know me well would think I spend a fortune on clothes.  Nope.  Never happens.

It's a game to me.  And I think it's fun.  Tomorrow is Friday.  Off to the hunt.  But I have a rule to this game.  However much I buy, I have to give that much away.  It works for me.  De-accumulate.