How To “Marie Kondo” Your Finances

The idea of Marie Kondo’ing your life in general can provide a significant assist to your finances. Most notably, getting rid of things you don’t need can help you to develop more conservative spending habits, which, over time, can result in significant savings. However, there are also steps you can take to apply the general Marie Kondo principles directly to your finances. Below, we want to briefly cover a few of those steps.

Determine Joyous Spending Habits

NBC News’s “Know Your Value” section actually took a specific look at how to apply Marie Kondo to finances as well. It largely repeated advice directly from Kondo, but this point stuck with us. Kondo speaks at length about the idea of getting rid of things that don’t spark joy, and specifically notes that this can be applied to other areas of life (as opposed to just straightening up). So, naturally, we’d apply it to finance! The idea of making an honest determination about which spending habits spark joy and which are burdensome – or just, literally, habits – can result in significant savings.

Categorize Your Spending

In a way this should actually come before the previous step. But needless to say, Marie Kondo focuses a fair amount, in one way or another, on categorizing. With specific regard to tidying up, this basically means identifying and organizing types of stuff, and then determining what doesn’t need to be there. Here too we’d argue that you can basically do the same thing when it comes to spending habits. The process won’t be as easy as organizing physical things in your home, but with some diligence you can write up a detailed, comprehensive spending chart identifying where you put money toward bills, food and drink, extra groceries, entertainment, etc. It’s a start toward “tidying up” your spending.

Identify The Apps You Spend On

Mobile apps can essentially be a sub-category relating to the ideas above, such that you can categorize your app spending and identify where there might be waste. For instance, a lot of people spend quite a bit on subscriptions to mobile journals and newspapers. Others have numerous streaming apps for audio and video content. And these days, free download games and the bonuses for slot games hosted by Canadian and British providers can lead people to start playing games for free that they wind up paying for later on – whether through in-app purchases, casino deposits, or something similar. Outlining all of this in detail can help you to start the process of narrowing things down.

Identify The Drinks You Spend On

This may seem like a random sub-category to mention, but as with mobile apps, drinks are something a lot of people spend a bit more than they mean to on. Whether it’s having another cocktail out with friends, adding a few extra espresso shots to morning drinks now and then, or getting into the latest bubble tea-style fad, those extra dollars can add up quickly. By writing out the details and tracking your drinking habits – categorizing them, if you will – you can determine which spending habits occur in the course of your average week and which ones really bring you joy. You can then adjust accordingly, and perhaps save a decent amount of money.

Sell & Save

One individual account of how Marie Kondo’s methods can lead to savings pointed out that selling stuff can actually result in making money. Logically, that’s an obvious statement, but when most of the conversation revolves around habits, you can start to forget about the simple fact that getting rid of things can generate income. Granted, this is more related to the general Marie Kondo process of cutting out the clutter from your life, but you can think of it as a specific financial effort as well. Selling the things you don’t need can always bring in some money, even if it’s a modest amount.