Stockpile gone wild

A couple days ago S came home from a run to the grocery store with a new bottle of lotion among the other food needs. Normally I try to keep my crazy a little better in check for him and the boys but for whatever reason that bottle of lotion threw me into a tizzy. Here’s the overriding issue: I loathe stockpiling. There are so many reasons I am against stockpiling. The biggest is that in my adult life I have moved, on average, a smidge over once a year. Some of the moves have been across town but several have been cross country. Especially on the bigger moves, having to pack and then having to possibly upsize the truck to hold stuff that we were just stockpiling annoys me. Inevitably, I end up giving away a bunch of stuff that I should never have purchased in the first place. Money wasted.

Another reason I don’t like stockpiling is that I really don’t like clutter nor do I want to pay for extra square footage just so I can have my own personal storeroom. Having to mentally keep track of what I have and how much and where it’s stored is just a layer of mental clutter that I also don’t want. Lastly, I don’t like spending money on something that’s just going to sit around. I’d prefer to have my limited amounts of money go towards paying off debt and reducing the amount I throw away on interest every month.

With that said there are a couple caveats. Things that we go through super-fast like diapers or toilet paper I don’t mind having a little extra stashed at the house. Especially if I find a fantastic bargain on diapers, having a stockpile is ok. For everything else, I feel we can wait until we are getting pretty low before I start looking for good deals to get a back-up to stick in the closet.

So back to the lotion. We have many, many, MANY other bottles of lotion lying around that he could have used up before we needed a new bottle. We have little tiny bottles we snag from hotels as well as some that were from my maternity room when I was on hospital bed rest. We have several fancy lotions that I received during pregnancy, post-partum, and for other random gifts. We have at least three, half used bottles of baby specific lotions. We have hand-creams, face creams with sunscreen, face cream without sunscreen, face cream specifically marketed for men, balms, and healing ointment tins and the list goes on and on. The thing is: our rate of lotion acquisition far exceeds our lotion use! And I can’t throw perfectly good things away.  

After going through all the lotion we had (to prove to S why we didn’t need another bottle) I started collecting all the other toiletries that have been accumulating. More gifts of fancy soaps and shaving creams. Body wash (I accidentally did a BOGO when we already had an extra, oops), various shampoo and conditioner including hotel bottles, and a whole array of little toothpastes and flosses from the dentist samples. All of this I arranged on our vanity and made S come and look (he humored me by looking astounded at how much stuff we had accumulated, or maybe he was just astounded at my level of craziness). I declared that we wouldn’t need to buy another toiletry item for at least a year.

I made the declaration in the midst of my mania but now I really am wondering if we could get by a whole year without buying another toiletry. So here it is, mid-January, and we’ve purchased one bottle of (unneeded) lotion. Let’s see just how long our current stockpile will last us!