WSJ Your Money Briefing - Your Clutter Is Costing More Than You Think

Episode Date: April 11, 2025

In 2024, Americans bought 5.7 times as much flatware and dishes and 3.5 times the furniture compared with 1994, according to Commerce Department data. They also purchased 2.5 times the clothing and footwear. Wall Street Journal reporter Dalvin Brown joins host Ariana Aspuru to discuss why cheap goods are actually costing us and how Trump’s tariffs threaten to curb trade from one of the biggest exporters of low-cost goods.  Sign up for the WSJ's free Markets A.M. newsletter.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, your money briefing listeners, this is Arianna Aspuru. Here at YMB, we're all about bringing you important personal finance and career news. We're working on making some changes to our personal finance content, and we want to hear from you. Our question today is, what personal finance topics do you want to hear more about? Stocks, bonds and markets, housing and mortgages, taxes, financial goals, or something else. If you're listening on Spotify, look for our poll under the episode description. Or you can send us an email to ymb at wsj.com. That's ymb at wsj.com. Now on to the show. Now on to the show. Here's your money briefing for Friday, April 11th.

I'm Mariana Aspuru for The Wall Street Journal. If you're in spring cleaning mode, you might be wondering, how in the world did I get all this stuff? WSJ reporter Dalvin Brown found that it's not just you. Americans are drowning in their own stuff. I tend to buy things because I forgot I bought it already. But we're not just accumulating. Like, that's what's really interesting to me.

We're duplicating. We're buying more of what we already have. We'll hear more from Dalvin about why it's costing you more than you think. Stick around after the break. Americans buy a crazy amount of cheap stuff, but it's costing us. Wall Street Journal reporter Dalvin Brown joins me. Dalvin, let's start off. How big of an issue is our clutter problem? It has reached crisis proportions, and I mean that. I found that it's not just about a cluttered closet anymore or a cluttered drawer. It's about entire rooms being dedicated to storage.

About 21% of people use over 500 square feet for storage, which is like the size of a two-car garage. And as one professional organizer told me, we're battling a tsunami of stuff, and the stuff is winning. From your story, which listeners can find in our show notes, I gather that people are buying more, moving more, and losing more of their own stuff.

Walk me through how that's all happening. Yeah, so it is a perfect storm created by ease of acquisition, so how easy it is to buy things, and then the difficulty of disposal. Online shopping and social media have made buying things really frictionless. So if you tap on your phone, something arrives at your door. A lot of people don't even remember what they ordered and then it just shows up at their door.

But getting rid of those things requires physical and emotional labor. And that's really taxing. So what's fascinating is how this cycle sort of feeds itself. People buy things, then they run out of space. So then they buy more organizational things to manage the things. And as one of my sources told me, I am buying things just to manage my things. U-Haul even had to increase the size of its largest trucks

by 60% over the past 10 years. I was shocked when the company told me that and it's basically to accommodate Americans growing volume of possessions. And one of the things you mentioned in your story that honestly made me laugh a little bit is how many people buy more things because they just forget that they already have this one thing and they can't find it. Yes, exactly. So 71% of Americans in a recent survey, that's the bulk of us. Yeah. Buy things that we already own because we can't find the other thing because we've hidden it

somewhere in our homes from ourselves. I, like you, Richard, I tend to buy things because I forgot I bought it already. But we're not just accumulating. Like, that's what's really interesting to me. We're duplicating. We're buying more of what we already have. There's so much interesting data that you bring up in your story. What was the most striking number about Americans habits that you found? In 2024, Americans bought 5.7 times more flatware and dishes compared to 1994. So three decades ago, people had a lot less stuff just in their kitchen. And that's not a small increase. That's nearly six times what previous generations purchased.

We're also buying 3.5 times more furniture, 2.5 times more clothing and footwear compared to 30 years ago. And it's not like I'm having 5.7 times more people over my house that I need all these dishes for, or all this furniture for. Exactly, and we don't have five or six times more space in our homes to put things.

So we're fitting multiples more possessions into roughly the same square footage. And it's no wonder that another number that came up for me was that downsizing a home now takes about 40 hours, which is double what it took a decade ago. And this all makes so much sense. But Dalvin, we now have constant access to low cost products from places like Tmoo and Shein. Is it just that we can't help ourselves when we see something that's just that cheap?

I also spoke to some psychologists who did say that when prices fall below a certain threshold, it impacts our decision-making processes fundamentally. One source in my story said, you see something cool, then it costs six dollars, and you think, why not? The mental calculation shifts from, do I need this? To why wouldn't I get this? And then you end up with more stuff in your home than you probably need. Looking ahead and looking at the news,

we're talking a lot about tariffs now. How might these heavy import taxes on foreign goods by the Trump administration impact this clutter we're talking about in our own lives? While the clutter issue has been a thing for years now, one of the things that pushes this conversation forward is the fact that the Treasury Secretary recently stated that access to low cost goods is not the essence of the American dream. And that signals a policy shift away from prioritizing cheap imports.

policy shift away from prioritizing cheap imports. If tariffs significantly increase prices, they might also slow the influx of inexpensive goods. So if tariffs make the things more expensive, then people might not buy as much. However, tariffs do not address the mountains of stuff that we already have. So that legacy will remain. We'll be dealing with the consequences of

that for years. Things may become more expensive to get, but some of the economists I talked to said that people just may change the way that they do consume or where they're getting their goods from. Let's say someone wants to declutter. They're listening and taking this as their sign. What are some cost-effective ways of getting rid of some items you might not need? In my story, I start with estate sales, because in some way, like that is the best way to get rid of a lot of stuff in one fell swoop. And you hire someone, they take 35 to 50% of the proceeds, and they let strangers just come in and buy your stuff within a couple

of days or they list it online. The Facebook Marketplace and offer ups of the world let you directly handle it and sell it to other people. The most important advice from professionals is to try to prevent the accumulation in the first place. Yeah, trying to turn off the tap rather than like buckets of scooping water out. Yeah, I mean, I have this rule that whatever comes in my house, I forget it sometimes.

I'm like, oh, one item in, one item out. I should probably do one item in, two items out. But you know, I think like that sort of that mechanism works for me. That's WSJ reporter Dalvin Brown, and that's it for your money briefing. Tomorrow, we'll have our weekly markets wrap up, What's News in Markets. And then on Sunday, catch the last episode of our three-part series,

Buying a Home in 2025, Navigating the Crunch. This episode was produced by me. I'm your host, Arianna Aspuru. Jessica Fenton and Michael Laval wrote our theme music. Our supervising producer is Melanie Roy. Aisha Al-Muslim is our development producer. Scott Salloway and Chris Sinzley are our deputy editors. And Falana Patterson is The Wall Street Journal's head of news audio. Thanks for listening! Bye!