What You Value Costs You
Watching the new run of reality shows on auctioning off storage units and pawn shops, I’m struck by the difference between the value of something to the seller vs. the buyer. I’ve run into a related problem in the sale of Real Estate. People hang on to houses for months, paying mortgages and taxes month after month, wasting any money they hope to get from a higher offer.
People will go bankrupt, or lose their possessions entirely, holding out for what they perceive the value to be. The monetary value of something is never a single penny more than what someone else will pay you for it. The buyer doesn’t care your grandmother gave it to you, or that you need more money for your child’s birthday. We assign additional value emotionally. We can attempt to transfer some of that emotion in a monetary transaction in an attempt to get a buyer to pay more. To the extent that works, you’re getting fair monetary value plus a DONATION received in response to your emotional appeal.
If the people who lost the possessions in their storage units had sold them to the pawn brokers instead, they would have been much farther ahead. They would have had “something,” and with “something,” you can make “more.” Nothing begets nothing. If they had given possessions away to family or friends, they would have been farther ahead. It’s hard not to let emotions cloud judgment but the ultimate cost of letting your judgement be clouded can be quite high. You stand to lose everything!
The one factor that matters the most is the ongoing cost of ownership. Everything you own costs you something. It creates an emotional load AND a financial load. Look around you. Everything you see has an ongoing cost of ownership. Every time you look at it, you will have an emotional cost. That emotional cost dictates how you feel about yourself and your place in the world at that moment. Posessions can make us feel happy, sad, blessed, or cursed. They make us feel strong or weak. The absence of things frees us while having a great number of possessions ties us down.
We tend to look at things we buy as “investments” and, in our minds, their value and importance grows. We think things have no cost once we’ve paid for them. That’s just not true. We don’t just house ourselves. We house our possessions. We take up very little space. It’s our possessions that require that fourth bedroom, a basement to “store” “things” in and a garage to store our car in. In fact, generally, while the monetary value of the item diminishes, the cost of ownership grows with property taxes, rent, housekeeping fees, always growing at least slightly with the cost of inflation. Start thinking about things in terms of their continued cost of ownership. Are there things you should get rid of because they just aren’t worth it?
It’s the emotional cost of ownership, however, not the monetary cost, that controls our lives. People keep things the same way they buy them – by emotion. The heart buys then the poor brain is tasked with making excuses and justifications. As you read this, you’re sitting in front of a screen of some kind. That’s the first object. It’s probably a helpful one that produces in excess of its cost. Look around you, however. Unless you’re on a bench out in the park, every single item your eye falls on has an emotional cost. Pay attention to the thoughts that run through your mind as your eye hits it. How does it make you feel? If it doesn’t make you feel happy, positive, and powerful, get rid of it.
