Organizing Could Save You $1.8 Million

It’s true….at least for a couple in Lousiana. They were organizing their home to make it ready for Thanksgiving guests when they came across a forgotten lottery ticket. It was set to expire in 2 weeks. I’m sure they were thankful for Thanksgiving falling when it did!

I see this happen a lot. Maybe not the $1.8 million, but I have found quite a bit of money in different forms during my 9 years of organizingwith clients. Here are just a few:

Month’s supply of toilet paper, paper towels, Ziploc bags — all sizes
Next year’s school supplies for several children
Frozen food for the next 6 months. . . . They had forgotten they stocked the freezer in the garage
The youngest child’s next set of clothes saved from the oldest child
A year’s supply of contact lenses with cleaning solution
New clothes still in the shopping bag
Gifts purchased but never given
Items needing to be returned for a full refund
Money—cold, hard cash—in purses, drawers, about-to-be-donated clothing.
A $50,000 check….this really did happen!

Needless to say, the $50,000 check was the most dramatic find. The client had just mentioned to me that the check was missing and to please keep an eye out for said check when I reached into a drawer full of scarves and pulled it out. She didn’t make the news but was just as pleased with the discovery.

The other items might seem small, but clients come back to me time and time again to tell me how finding something like the contact lenses saved them from having to repurchase the lenses. . . and that meant I had just paid for my own services.

I LOVE saving people money!!

Being organized simply means determining a home for the items in your home & following a routine to keep them there. Start with the obvious, i,e.,clothes/dishes/garden tools. Save items like gift wrap/candles/games for the end. Then, like they taught us in Kindergarten, return items to where you found them and better than you found them.

Doing it later is your enemy. What if this Lousiana couple had waited?