A common misconception is that wealthy people don’t have clutter because they can afford to buy such beautiful things. Of course, that’s not true. Expensive things can be clutter too.
A journalist once asked me, ‘Isn’t clutter something that only less affluent people have to deal with?’
I mentioned this to a wealthy client I was working with at the time to help her clear her clutter, and she found it highly amusing. ‘The only real difference is that wealthy people tend to have more expensive clutter!’ she said, looking around her.
Wealthy people may handle clutter differently, though. For example, when sorting through one room with this particular client, she scheduled her staff to arrive at hourly intervals to move the items she had decided to let go of to her barn, where an auctioneer had been booked to come and value them. Each piece of clutter was worth tens of thousands of pounds.
Another woman I knew used her wealth to buy herself a new house right next door to her old one. She left all her old stuff in her old house, so she would know where her things were if she ever wanted them, and gave herself a fresh start in the new house. Of course her new home soon became as cluttered as her old one because she did nothing to get to the source of why she felt the need to have so much stuff in the first place.
A category of clutter that can afflict rich and poor alike is things that are untidy or disorganized. Wealth is certainly no antidote to this. However, it usually doesn’t show as much because well-off folk can afford to employ other people to tidy up after them and organize their life for them.
Types of clutter wealthy people are less likely to have
There is one type of clutter that I’ve noticed self-made successful wealthy people tend not to have – the mental clutter of procrastination. When there is something to be done, they are much more likely than less successful people to get into gear and just do it.
I’ve also noticed that most self-made successful people rarely work in physically cluttered surroundings. Intuitively they know how counter-productive that can be.
So if you’d like more success in whatever you do, these two little tips can be very helpful to know.
Copyright © Clear Space Living Ltd 2012, updated 2022
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How do you reconcile bad energies in their home with the fact that they have accumulated wealth and have held on to it? If bad energies were really so bad, surely that would erode their wealth?
I don’t subscribe to the notion of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ energies. I look to see whether energies are flowing or stagnant, harmonious or conflicting, compatible or mismatched.
The problem with clutter is that it stagnates the energy of a person’s home, which then has a correspondingly stagnating effect in their life. By looking to see where clutter is located according to the different areas of the feng shui bagua, it is very easy to see which aspects of their life are affected. For example, clutter located in the Wealth area can have a stagnating effect on finances, clutter located in the Relationships area may have a dulling effect on a marriage, and so on. So someone may be wealthy, or be married, but if they have clutter in the corresponding area of their home, it’s unlikely that they feel fulfilled.
Came across this quote today and thought it applied!
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
Many wealthy people are little more than janitors of their possessions. -Frank Lloyd Wright, architect (1867-1959)