Let’s Play Keep, Sell or Toss

There was a television show on several years called Clean Sweep, where the host of the show would go into people’s homes to help them organize it. The basic premise of the show was to convince the homeowners to either keep, sell or toss their belongings. The host would set up three different areas and would encourage the homeowners to place individual belongings in one of the three areas. Those three areas were labeled Keep, Sell and Toss.

In most cases, the Keep pile remained large, and the host had to step in and discuss why the homeowners felt an attachment to each of those items. At the end of the process, the homeowners can part with more of the items which were then placed either on the Sell or Toss piles.

If you are looking to become more organized, why not play the same game as the show? Take a day or a weekend, and create the same three piles. Ask a neighbor or a friend to step into the role of the host and moderate when you find it difficult to part with your items. Your host can ask you the tough questions about why you are hanging onto them. When the process is complete, you will not only make some extra cash from the sell pile, you will have the first step needed to becoming more organized.

You can choose to do this one room at a time or multiple rooms. It’s probably easier to keep it simple with just one room. This can be a test run and when that works out, move onto other rooms. After doing this for several rooms, you may find you have a nice chunk of change from the Sell pile. There were several episodes of Clean Sweep where the homeowners came away with several thousands of dollars. This is quite feasible, depending on the number of items you have accumulated while living in your home.

The good news is you don’t even have to hold a yard sale to sell the items from the Sell pile. You can sell them online, either via eBay or Etsy or you can sell them on consignment, either online or at a pawn shop. Another choice is to advertise that you have many items for sale and let someone make you an offer for the entire lot. This can be done on Craigslist.org and other online classified websites.