DECLUTTERING OUR MONEY: have you made a home for yours?

As I began to look at the way money "clutter" affects my creativity, I immediately discovered something interesting.

Despite the large and lovely spaces in my house, my money-related stuff has no single home here. I keep checks in one place, stamps and envelopes in another, records in still another. Some of my bills arrive via email, some via snail mail, which I pick up from the post office, put on the breakfast bar, and get to in some moment when I'm not busy at other things. I sit down and pay bills, or handle other financial matters, in a variety of places--the breakfast bar, my bed, my dining room table. No problem, except that I almost always leave a trail of stuff that then has to be put away in what seems like twenty different places.

As I said in my previous post, I'm quite good at getting things handled on time despite this hit-or-miss, here-or-there methodology. Yet I know that the price I pay for it is high in other ways. I may seem organized to the folks at FPL or FICO or American Express, but I don't feel it. Low-level money fogginess invades my mind often, sometimes when there's actually nothing wrong. I work much harder on trivial financial tasks than I have to, and spend less time than I'd like thinking about bigger money issues.

On a symbolic level, I think, not giving our money a true home in our space speaks volumes about how much we honor it and the role it plays in sustaining our lives in general and our creative work in particular. If I don't respect this aspect of my life enough to carve out a little physical space for it, how good can my stewardship of it truly be? If I begrudge my money a couple of square feet and a little organization, can I really complain if it doesn't work for me with optimal results? To my mind, the answers are "not very" and "hell no." I don't say this in judgment of myself or anyone else. I've never yet met a woman whose family trained her in financial management or encouraged her to make space or time for her money. And when we enter the world of the creative arts, money dis-ease becomes a badge of honor. It's not surprising that so many of us avoid money matters when we can, hurry through them when we must, and leave them homeless in gorgeous, thoughtful residences that have room for everything else.

I'm currently in the process of giving my money its own functional and appealing space in my home. I've made a space under the giant vision board some of you have seen in my home office and given financial records a whole file drawer. (Whoo-hoo!) I've gathered envelopes, stamps, pens I like, a letter opener, a scissors. I've dedicated a simple monthly planner to recording what bills are due, when they're due, and what and when I've paid. I've put a chair near that area to remind me to work on it there and some wonderful images right above it to remind me why it's worth my time.

I have to admit that this feels childish at times, like I'm setting up an Easy Bake Oven in the living room and pretending to be a chef. That feeling disconcerted me at first, but I realized pretty quickly that it's perfectly appropriate.

At fifty-five, a novelist and a poet and a memoirist and a teacher, an owner of my own business and a veteran of management roles in financial organizations and the former owner of a New York apartment, with a house that has an art room and a writing room and a reading room and a lounge, I'm just now taking baby steps on decluttering my money issues.

So setting up an Easy Bake Oven equivalent—let's call it Shaky Suzy's Marvelous Mini Money Mart—is probably right on target.

Wanna come over and play?