The Financial Home Edit Part 1: Declutter (The Closet Clean-Out)
Reader, I am spent. Since January 1st, I’ve written 110,000 words of my book and about 120,000 words for these 45 Substack essays. Which is all to say, I don’t have a groundbreaking essay about investing in the right person, or a practical guide to estate planning. As I write this in late September, I have about five weekends left to complete my book. All my brain cells are over there, so please enjoy this light-hearted three-part series inspired by Marie Kondo’s The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up to help you get your shit together before the end of the year.
Key takeaways:
Decluttering your money allows you to focus on what’s actually important.
Financial decluttering means you can stop wasting energy on managing chaos.
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Marie Kondo had us all emptying our closets onto the floor like penitents at confession. Her little book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, sold millions because it spoke to something most of us already knew: we’re drowning in stuff we don’t need. Having too much stuff is clouding our vision and creating unnecessary stress. It’s hard to get dressed if your closet is 50% full of stuff you never wear. The method was simple, almost militant: Take everything you own, pile it in the middle of the room, and touch each item one by one. That old college sweatshirt? The box of middle school art projects your mom guilt-dropped on you? Ask yourself if it sparks joy. If it doesn’t, out it goes.
I loved this practice. Not because I wanted to live in a minimalist white box, but because it forced me to see what I was holding onto out of habit, guilt, or lack of inertia. There’s even a darker cousin to this method: Swedish Death Cleaning, which is exactly what it sounds like. Declutter now so your loved ones aren’t stuck digging through your junk when you’re gone, and you can live with only the stuff you love. Both approaches are about stripping away the noise so you can see what really matters. I think we can apply these same principles to our money. Starting with putting it all in a pile in the center of the room.
Put Everything in a Pile
At my firm, we collect data on every single account in a planning tool called RightCapital. It gives our clients a full picture of their financial life in one place—checking accounts, savings, investments, debt, and even insurance policies. Most people have never actually seen everything they own and owe pulled together like that, and the clarity can be shocking. It’s also the first step in making smart decisions, because you can’t plan for the future if you don’t know what exactly you have in the present.
There are solid consumer tools that can help you do the same thing on your own. Empower gives you a snapshot of all your accounts in one dashboard. Tiller pulls your transactions automatically, but pulls them into a Google sheet you can manipulate in any way you want. These tools aren’t glamorous, but they work—and the tool you’ll actually use is always better than the “perfect” one you’ll abandon. The goal isn’t to become obsessed with tracking every transaction. The goal is visibility. If you can see where your money lives, clutter can’t sneak back in unnoticed.
Clear Away Clutter
Most of us are carrying around financial clutter we’ve forgotten about. Old bank accounts we opened in college. Subscriptions we meant to cancel months ago. Credit cards that cost more in fees than they’re worth. Digital wallets and half-used apps scatter our money into a dozen hiding places. I still pay sixty bucks a year for some bizarre legacy version of Microsoft Office I can’t figure out how to cancel. Every time it renews, I get annoyed and then forget about it until the next year. All this is clutter. And it does not spark joy.
The same goes for email. Banks, brokerages, and credit card companies are some of the worst offenders of cluttering your inbox. If your email is drowning in “exciting loan opportunities” and “exclusive credit offers,” how are you supposed to notice the one message from your bank or credit card company that actually matters—the fraud alert or the overdraft warning? Decluttering isn’t just about closing accounts; it’s about cutting out all the crap that makes it harder to pay attention to the important stuff.
The fix doesn’t have to be complicated. For your personal banking, you really only need one checking account and one high-yield savings account. Anything else is unnecessary and is probably obfuscating your real savings number. For subscriptions, sit down with a credit card or bank statement, highlight every recurring charge, and be ruthless. If you don’t use it or don’t value it, cut it. With credit cards, list what you have, what you pay in annual fees, and what perks you actually use. If a card doesn’t earn its keep, downgrade it or close it. Just make sure to approach this task carefully because your credit score might suffer if you close a card you’ve had for a long time. I typically recommend keeping any card that’s more than five years old.
If you’re a business owner, the clutter is often even worse. Maybe you opened an LLC for a side hustle that’s been dormant for years, or you’re technically still part of a partnership that hasn’t had revenue since 2019. Now is the time to simplify. You’ll want to “dissolve” any old LLCs by filing an “Articles of Dissolution.1” If you opened an S-Corp or Partnership and have a separate business entity, you’ll want to ask your accountant to file a final year tax return. Closing old entities and their bank accounts clears away liability for any outstanding clients to sue you (most of the time), trims your paperwork, and frees up brain space for the work that actually matters now. When you know what you have, what you owe, and what’s worth keeping, you stop wasting energy managing chaos and start putting your energy toward the things that matter.
Parting shot: Cancel one subscription and close one account you don’t use. It’s not about saving ten bucks, it’s about proving you’re in charge.
This is in New York State; yours may have different rules.
Yes!! I’m re-reading the book “Essentialism” and I couldn’t help but relate it to Marie Kondo’s book too. De-clutter all the tasks that aren’t aligned with your top priority too!