Self-Storage Costs: What They Mean for Your Money

Have you ever noticed how self storage units are popping up faster than Starbucks?
Yeah. Me too. Hey, it’s Steve here, the old Get Out of Debt guy, and I’m joined as always by the
new Get Out of Debt guy, Damon Day. Say hello, Damon. Hello, Damon. Today we’re opening the door
literally on a growing American obsession, self storage, from climate control closets to units
that you haven’t opened since 2014. We’re digging into why so many people are paying monthly to
store stuff they probably forgot and paying for other things they’re not even using.
So is it clutter? Is it trauma? Is it expensive procrastination? And what should you actually
consider before signing that next storage lease or leaving a subscription abandoned in the wilderness?
Stick around because we got some eye-opening true smart money tips and maybe a little tough love.
Come in your way. Damon, you are the king of self storage units. I’ve only had one in my life.
I’m the king consumer of self storage units. What I should be is the king investor of self storage units.
You know, I actually have, this won’t come as a big shocker to you, but I have a whole bunch of facts
did my research and it seems like the the moment to invest in self storage is passed because
there was a heyday, especially around COVID. They couldn’t they couldn’t build them fast enough,
but recently I talked to somebody locally that owns some self storage units and they said competition
is getting fierce, but let me give you this number. The average, not the average, the amount of money
that Americans spend storing their stuff in these self storage places. Oh my god.
$44 billion a year. Billion with the B. Billion with the B. And another fact that was interesting
in the research was how different the cost of these units is depending on where you live. The most
expensive is LA and the least expensive is somewhere in the Midwest, like Kansas, for example.
The least expensive is always somewhere in the Midwest. No matter what you’re talking about.
The the average for a 10 by 10 non climate controlled unit is about 128 bucks a month,
that not on the coast. Not not on the coast, right? So how much have you spent for self storage unit?
Oh god. Well, I the reason we’re doing this topic today is because I finally finally cleared out
my last self storage unit. Now, now don’t get me wrong. I still have a self storage parking covered
parking space for the trailer. So I’m not completely out of the woods on that yet. I’m still a
consumer, but I mean, I can’t remember the last time I and I’m going back years and years and
years. Well, at least ever since I’ve met you. Yeah. So we’re talking probably 20 years. I’ve
always had, you know, multiple or at least one self storage unit. And there’s been reasons and
justifications for it. And I mean, I don’t remember how many I haven’t sat down and thought about it,
but we’ve moved, you know, since my wife and I’ve been married the last 20 years, we’ve moved
probably five times and some of them multi, you know, different states that we’ve moved and tried
different things and moved back. And so I’ve always kind of been like in this transitional period,
I felt like with a lot of the stuff, right? And I’ve got, um, I’m Steve might call me a hoarder,
but I’m not necessarily a hoarder. I’m not like those guys that you see on TV, like with those
shows that I’m not there, but I definitely have the tendencies in my brain. And I think a lot of it
is just emotional connection to things that are tied to memories for me, right? Like a lot of it
is the kids stuff. You know, the kids are all three are still at the house, but they’re older now.
So this storage unit I just cleaned out most of it that was in there was bins labeled kids memories.
I mean, but and that’s that’s what it was. But a lot of it was just procrastination on, you know,
dealing with it. Like you just pay the bill every month or whatever, but you know, you’re paying $200
a month, you know, that’s $2,400 a year. And when you, you got to take the emotion out of it,
you start thinking about it logically, like, well, to what end are we storing this for, right? Like,
are we going to like just give the kids all their bins when they yeah, you walk the college?
You know, they’re not going to want it. Yeah, they’re not going to want that stuff. You know,
so we’re just delaying the inevitable because of it. At some point, we’re going to have to clean
out the storage bin and go through it and decide what we don’t need anymore. And eventually,
those blankets and clothes and stuffed animals and things that they have eventually that stuff’s
just going to disintegrate anyway. You know, it won’t last forever. So, so to answer your question,
how much have I spent on storage? Now, let me also say, there have been times that I have known you
where you have had multiple units in multiple states at the same time. Yes.
It’s it’s called strategic. Yeah. Yeah. And my advice has always been the same. Your stuff,
you don’t own your stuff. Your stuff owns you. Yeah. And the logical side of my brain would
always hear what Steve says and goes, yes, I agree. But then I wouldn’t do anything. Right. And I
would just be like, but it would be like a form of procrastination. Like, well, I’ll just pay
the bill deal with it later. I’m busy. I don’t have time right now. And it’s not forcing me to make
a decision on what to do with the stuff. And so, but before you know it, like just this one unit
alone that we find that it was an air conditioned unit out here in Arizona, we got it when we move
from Colorado to Arizona. We got that as one of about four units that we got because when we
moved, it was March of 2020. Yeah. And for those of you that remember what it was like in March of 2020,
the country was starting to shut down. They were like not allowing people to cross state lines by
April or May. We were nervous. We were even going to be able to get out of Colorado. We just moved
and put all of our stuff in storage. And we were in our fifth wheel trailer at the lake in Arizona.
We didn’t have a house here yet. We were just like, okay, let’s camp at the lake. And I mean,
we literally had like life straws. Like it just in case like, I mean, this was like, you know,
pandilirium going on, right? Like I don’t know if we’re turning into zombies at this point in time
or what. So we were like, the trailer was stock. We’re kind of at the lake, kind of away from
civilization in this big fifth wheel life straws. In case we ran out of water, kind of stuff, you know,
people were freaking out. So I’m like, in my genius, I’m like, well, the market’s going to crash
because this is obviously a huge pandemic. So let’s wait to buy a house, right? Genius move Clark.
So we put everything in storage at that time. And we just kind of waited it out. And then oops.
So I ended up having, and I’ve paired down the storage unit once we got into a house. I had
this great idea that to my wife, I said, well, this is COVID to do an online school for a year.
They’re, you know, this is all crazy. Why don’t we just live in this nice fifth wheel that we have?
And we could travel and turn COVID into an adventure because when else are we going to have this
opportunity when the kids don’t have to be in class? They’re, they’re online learning now because
COVID. And she was like gun, you know, all gun hole. We’re going to do this. And she lasted like
three months, maybe. Get me out of here. Yeah. And it was, you know, it was a 45-foot fifth wheel,
you know, multiple bedrooms, bathrooms. I mean, it was nice. But we had three dogs, three kids.
And she goes, you go hide up in your office and I got to deal with everything else. Right. So,
yeah, about three months in, she’s like, get a house. So we ended up getting a house and got
most of stuff out of storage. But this one unit I’ve had since then. And mainly I kept it because
it was climate controlled or in Arizona. And I had, you know, leftover stuff that we didn’t,
you know, bring into the house. And mainly it was Christmas decoration. And anybody that knows
my wife knows that she goes crazy on Christmas time. And it’s a lot of decorations. And I didn’t
want that stuff cluttering up my garage. So that was kind of my justification for keeping the
storage unit. But, you know, it was, but it also not only is it $200 a month, it was now I got
to rent a U-Haul. Right. Right. Well, you know, twice a year. To bring your Christmas crap.
Yeah. It’s October, you know, okay, it’s time for the U-Haul load. So drive, you know, get the U-Haul
drive out. Get all this. And so you start looking at all this stuff and going to what end,
to re, you know, decorating for Christmas here. So this last year, we had all the stuff at the
house for Christmas. And we were talking about it. And I was like, no, I’d really like to get rid
of that storage unit. That’s $2,400 a year. Yeah. And is there a way that we can still celebrate
Christmas and decorate, but not have to store all of the stuff? So we had, we actually went through
it all. And there was a lot of things that we had that we didn’t use anymore. Just stayed in
the bins. It was in a bin labeled Christmas, but it was older decorations. We didn’t put it up,
or they didn’t work. You throw it away. We threw away a lot of stuff. Congratulations.
Well, you know, I’m sitting here going, babe, for $2,400 a year, I could buy a lot of just new
stuff every year. Not that I want to do that, but at the same time, I mean, you could buy a lot
for $2,400 every year. So, but yeah, we went through it. And also this house that we’re in now
that we’ve been in for a couple of years has a ton of storage like four to ceiling cabinets that
were empty. We didn’t have anything to go in there. And I was like, what if we took the nicer,
so my wife was able to store a lot of the Christmas stuff in the house. And we got rid of a lot of
those. We know we have those, we have, I don’t even want to count them up, but I have like, I had like
probably 40 of those 27 gallon home depot, you know, the black and yellow. Did you pitch those too?
No, I put them up for, those are valuable. I put them up for sale. I took all the, all the empty ones
because once we stored everything a lot of the stuff in the house, I didn’t need them anymore.
I mean, these things are like, you know, 9, 10 bucks a piece at home depot. I just put them up like,
you know, five for 25 bucks on, on Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace. And people snatch those
things up. But yeah, we got everything finally cleaned out because once we had the Christmas stuff
sorted out, there wasn’t that much left in the storage unit. It was just the kids’ memories,
like I was talking about at that point. So, so we cleared it out. And actually this month
was the first month. And as long as I can remember that I did not have a storage payment.
Yeah, come out of my card account. And it was a great feeling. And then a few days later,
I got hit for the parking space for my job. You all.
Hey, you know, you know what we did with a lot of those childhood paper memories, you know,
the cards and the drawings and everything else. Digitize them. Yeah. Yeah.
Scandal of procrastination. The procrastination comes in. So you just have to take the time
to do that, right? Oh, and we also did that with, you know, those boxes and boxes of old photos.
I scanned all those. Pitch them. Yeah. Yeah. Well, especially with my issue, right, with the,
you know, the emotion and you’ll see in the thing and it triggers the memory. Yeah. Well,
the picture of the thing will do the same thing, right? You don’t have to have the physical
object, right? And in honestly, what I found, too, is I would rather go back and look at old videos
than have a bike in my garage. Oh, I remember this bike. I’d rather have the video of my kid
learning to ride that bike, right? And then you can, you know, take your time and put all those
together and put it into like Apple TV on the screensaver kind of thing. So when you’re not
watching TV, you got your old kids movies, you know, going on. That’s much better because the
logical side of my brain would always go, what, you know, I’m eventually going to die, right?
Someday we will die. I mean, this is kind of where you’re going to actually. You’re going to pass
on all your trash to your kids to have to deal with. Yeah. So that, that was actually one of the
main motivators is what is the end goal for the stuff that’s in this unit? And is the stuff
that’s in this unit even worth the $2,400 per year that I’m paying? And my conclusion was it’s not
even worth one year of $2,400. Like if my, if my unit was on storage wars, Jared would be pissed off
if he spent a lot of money on it. Well, I mean, let’s extrapolate it, right? So we’ve known each other
let’s say 20 years, okay? Yeah. If at a minimum, you were paying $2,400 a year for storage.
And some years, you were paying more. You’re probably over that 20 years. You’re probably what?
50 grand in storage fees. I don’t even know, but you don’t need to make me cry in the hot
bathroom. But, but in my defense, it, uh, whenever I had more than one storage unit, it was for a
short period of time because we were in the middle of a move or something like that. Like I never
carried like three storage units for a year or two or anything because that, that would be crazy
talk, Steve. Yes, that would. And so let’s talk about the, the demographic of people that
typically have, this is a fact that, uh, surprised me in my research, was 28% of self-storage
renters are actually middle aged women between 40 and 55, typically because of life transitions,
like moving divorce or downsizing. Yeah. Yeah. And a lot of it is you just have to, you know,
take stock of what is in that story. And I’m not saying there’s never a need for storage, right?
There are definitely times where, but it should always be for the most part temporary unless it’s
a very special situation. Um, you know, because at the end of the day, it, whatever’s in that storage
unit, like for me, I went to the storage unit twice a year, mainly to get the Christmas stuff out,
and then I could see kind of take stock. But honestly, if that Christmas stuff wasn’t in there that I
needed, I probably would never go to the storage unit. Like, you know, whatever you put in there,
it kind of goes in there to die. You know, you’re like, you’re never going to anything that’s in
the storage unit is not going to be something that you’re going to use. It’s just going to sit in
there typically until it’s not useful anymore because it’s so old that when you touch it,
it disintegrates. So that’s a great segue into paying for things that you don’t need anymore,
like even through subscriptions. And the reason I think that that is such a good topic is because
just this morning, I was canceling a payment that I was on the hook for every month.
And I always do those things through PayPal because once you can find the link in PayPal about where
to you’re all your subscriptions are managed, your automatic payments, you can cancel and just
and it goes away. But there are lots of us that have subscriptions that we pay for every month
for things that we just don’t use anymore.
Yeah, and it may not be like, oh, it’s $200 a month, like that’s a big, it could be,
so about a month ago, Steve, I’m going through my credit card statement and this is a good exercise
to do at least once a year, I would recommend this, to go through your statements,
words as credit card statement, a bank statement or wherever your bills come out of and go through
and highlight anything that you don’t immediately recognize and figure out what it is because most
people can find $100, $200, $300 a month that they really don’t need or don’t use.
Right. But so, and this was a small example, but I was looking at my statement last month and there
was a $5 charge for CVS, you know, the pharmacy. Yeah. And it was, and I went back and I was like,
that’s weird, we don’t really shop at CVS, it’s not one of our go-to stores. And then I looked at
the month before, same $5 charge, and I can’t remember what it said, but whatever in the description
was, it gave me the impression that this was something I pay every month, right? So I went to my wife
and I was like, hey, what’s this $5 at CVS? And she looks at me and she goes, I don’t know.
And I’m like, well, I definitely don’t know. So we had to like look at what the thing,
what the wording was on it and Google that to try to figure out what we were paying $5 a month
for, turns out it was some CVS reward program that we pay $60 a year, you know, $5 a month
automatic. And we get some kind of discount or something, we didn’t even, neither one of us knew
what kind of discount we got. It was probably something that was like, oh, if you sign up for this
today, you’re going to get, you know, $50 off this order or whatever it was, you know, you know,
how they do that stuff. So I went back to, and now, so we went and canceled it, obviously. Now,
you think, well, $5, let’s 60 bucks a year, that’s not nothing. I went back and looked, Steve,
we had been paying this $5 a month for almost eight. Oh my God.
Eight years. Eight years, almost $500 that we’ve paid to CVS over eight years.
And I can promise you, we did not get $500 in discounts because we never shop at CVS.
But I just happen to be looking at this going. And it was just a little $5 a month. Yeah.
That was it. And I’m like, what is this? Well, it is true. Somebody did get rewarded.
Yeah. So we had to click, click, click. We had to research how to cancel it, got it canceled.
But yeah, even if you don’t have a storage unit, that was just one example. Pretty much, I think,
every household can go through and find, like we canceled Hulu the other like six months ago,
because I never watch Hulu. And I never see Hulu on. I mean, we watch my family’s more of a Netflix
type of family when we do watch something. And so I asked my wife, I’m like, do you watch anything
on Hulu? She’s like, no, not really. I’m like, we’re paying $22 a month for Hulu. Yeah.
And nobody watches Hulu. So we canceled it. And I didn’t even say anything to my kids. I just
canceled it. They didn’t know it. And you know what? And in six months, not one of my kids,
they said, hey, who doesn’t work? So that’s $250 a year that we didn’t need. You know,
because you know, we get, we do the Hulu and the Netflix and all that stuff because like 10
years ago, I decided cable was too expensive. Yeah. But the dish, but dude, it all adds up.
And oh, yeah, I was good. But back then, 10 years ago, it was like, look at how much money I’m
going to save. I mean, high speed internet was like $20 a month, you know, 10, 15 years ago
when I did it. And then, you know, and then all these subscription things were like super cheap.
And it was like, oh, I’m saving all this money. But nowadays between high speed internet and
Netflix and Hulu and, you know, Amazon Prime and this, that and the other thing and HBO,
Matt, whatever all these things are. And oh, ESPN plus because I want to watch my sports or whatever.
Now I’m like, I did all this and jumped through all these hoops to save money. Now it’s cheaper
if I just go back to dish network and just watch everything the old fashioned way with the GDR.
Yeah. That’s only like $100 a month now. And I’m not paying like 200 a month for all these
damn subscriptions. And you know what’s funny is like with Amazon Prime, you get the video stuff
at no additional charge. But I noticed the other day that if you have a Walmart plus membership,
you get paramount streaming at no additional charge. Are you serious? Yeah.
Because we have Walmart plus and I pay $299. It’s only $3 a month, but there go. Adds it up, right?
I pay $299 a month for paramount. Paramount. Yeah, that one. But I get Walmart plus. You know
why we get Walmart plus because I get it because of the the penny stupid project when we drive for
Walmart’s part. Yeah. It’s one of the perks as a driver. So I get that included. And then here I
am, my, my dumb butt, not even utilizing a benefit because it’s only $3 a month. Yeah. I mean,
do you have showtime? No, I don’t have showtime because that’s not anything. I really, most of
those shows I don’t want my kids watching. Okay. Anyway, so I, I don’t have showtime. But that’s the
other thing is when it comes to this entertainment that the options are, you know, YouTube TV is like,
you know, 50 bucks a month or whatever. You really have to decide, you know, how to, how to
pair that down to only what you actually need. Right. And newsflash. It is entertaining, but it’s
also a time waste or two. So, you know, it’s sometimes it doesn’t hurt to just cut that stuff out.
And be like, you know what? I’m going to go TV free for the most part for three months and try
that out. You’ll save money and you’ll be more productive because you won’t be binging a whole
season of Yellowstone on Netflix or Nissan on Prime or whatever it’s on. And, you know, it’s funny.
I think, I think we watch more on YouTube these days. I, I couldn’t even tell you what’s on
broadcast TV anymore. They still have broadcast TV? Well, you know, what’s on the major networks?
Nothing. I was watching the major network. Yeah. Yeah. But that, that was kind of the catalyst for,
for this episode was I was pretty proud of myself. And I know Steve was even more. Oh my god,
yes. When I called him up and I was like, dude, I closed the store as you. And he is like,
how the freaking Louis. That’s right. It only took 20 years of nagging you, but, you know,
congratulations. Yeah. Hey, I got it done, right? But, but, you know, there’s some, what’s the,
I mean, the statistics are all over the board, but they’re, there’s something like, you know,
14 and a half million households have storage in the, in the US, 14 and a half million. Yeah.
And, you know, most people, they said, lesser and cans, they’re paying 200 plus. My favorite
thing about the storage units is the dear John letters that you get. You know, about these
things, because I know you don’t use storage, but you, so anybody that has a storage unit knows
about the dear John letters. And these are the letters that you get about every six months.
And they start dear John, because we strive to keep our storage units in condition.
God, I can think it’s coming. And we do this and we do that. We’re just letting you know that
the rates have had to go up, have had to have gone up in the last six months. We value you as
a customer, but just so you know, you’re now paying us an extra 10 bucks a month. Congratulations.
Yeah. This, and they come about every six months. Anybody that has a storage unit knows they come,
gets the dear John letter goes, shit. And then keeps paying for it anyway. And, and they’d be happy
if you cancel because they can raise the storage just always just goes up. And it’s like, when I first
got that, you know, I went back and looked at my statement five years ago. Yeah. I was curious.
You know what I paid for that 10 by 15 air-conditioned storage unit per month when I got it in 2020?
120. 89 dollars a month. Yeah. What’s it going for now?
Well, now I’m paying 200. I was like, 1, 195 with the taxes, but I’m paying. Yeah. But if you,
now I canceled it, if I turn right back around and say, oh my gosh, I changed my mind,
that same unit that I just canceled at 195 is 300. So, so they are fine with sending you the
dear John letter that, oh, your 185 is going up to 195. Because if you get pissed and canceled,
they have no shortage of somebody going, I’ll pay 300. Yeah. So, so yeah, that storage unit has,
has a little more than doubled in price in five years. And I know you mentioned this at the top
of the show about, you know, investing in storage units used to, you know, we kind of missed the
the heyday. Right. But, but, you know, you don’t have to invest in storage units, but what I would
challenge somebody to do is go through whether they have storage units, subscriptions, whatever,
figure out what you can cut out of your life that you really don’t need, wouldn’t miss, can do
without, and then take that money. And just to get an Acorns account, make it simple, just invest
that money just in the, in the market or a Roth IRA, just money that you wouldn’t really miss
because you were spending it anyway. And instead of making the owners of the storage units rich and
the Disney pluses and the Netflix guys rich, put that money into your own retirement so you can
benefit from that money that you are earning, give it to yourself, not to all these companies.
So, as an update, since we did that show where we first talked about Acorns a couple months ago,
a few months ago, something like that, here’s my update today. My balance is $841, and I’ve
currently made an 8% return. So, so while the market was tanking, you and I were buying. Yeah.
And, and things were going well. We set my 18 year old up with his own Acorns account because we
are doing, I’m out there, he’s learning to get his license and we’re doing DoorDash and Instacart.
So, as he’s learning to drive and getting those hours, he will drive me around and we will go
around and get these jobs and we have a deal, we’ll split, whatever we make, which is a horrible
deal for me, but it’s a great deal for him. Yeah, but look, you’re getting all that quality
father time. Oh, for sure. Yeah, but I kind of was joking with him the other day. I was like,
you know, this is a great deal for you because when you come out with me, it takes me twice as long
to get something done because I’m teaching you how to do it. And I’m only getting half the money
and I’m covering all the expenses and you usually want to get Chipotle before we go home and I
cover that. I’m like, so at the end, you’re right, I am earning time with my son, but I’m not earning
any money. But the cool thing for him is he’s learning to skill why he’s out driving, learning how to
drive and he’s very diligent about every week on Monday, he, you know, I pay him, I sell him over half
of whatever we made because the money goes into my account because they’re my apps, he doesn’t have
his license yet. So he can’t get on these apps. And so I give him half and he immediately takes
30% of whatever I send him and that goes into his Roth IRA with acorns. He takes 30% another 30%
and puts it into his investment account with acorns. And then he keeps, then he keeps the 40%. So he’s
up to, and we’re not driving really a lot. I’ve been really busy. I mean, we drive maybe less than
10 hours a week, probably more like five or six hours a week lately. We’re not driving very much.
But he’s got already just in the last, I think we’ve been doing this about a month and a half maybe.
He’s got, I think he was up to about $800 between his two investment. Amazing.
And he’s an 18 year old kid and we’ve gone over those numbers where once he gets his license,
you know, we get back from our trip the summer, he’s going to be starting community college,
he’ll be, get his license, he’ll be driving. He’ll be able to, you know, get himself on
door dash and Instacard and Walmart spark. And we figured just based on, you know, his availability
and it’s very flexible, he’ll be able to make easily about 800 to a thousand bucks a week doing
that. So he’ll be making enough money to max out his Roth IRA every year and then probably put
between the Roth IRA and his investment account probably anywhere from 1500 to $2,000 a month
in investments because he has no bills. He lives at home. We paid for his food and that’s the time
when kids need to be investing. Yeah, because we talked about it. That’s, if he leaves it in there,
he’s going to be a millionaire by the time he retires. He will be a millionaire by the time
he retires, regardless of what he does with his degree, because the latest one he told me the other
night was he’s thinking about switching his animation degree to music. Oh my god. Go from one that’s
probably going to get you become obsolete from AI to one that is probably not going to be obsolete,
but it’s hard to make money yet. Well, next thing he’ll do is dance, English, or philosophy.
Hey, keep investing that money in acorns, bro. Talking about kids doing well financially. So
I don’t think our listeners know this, but I do another podcast. It’s called Good Morning Weight
County. It’s all good news stories. Anyway, I’m working on one for today’s podcast about an
eight-year-old in Texas. This kid is in a second grade and he learned that trash cans along
the side of the road, aluminum cans can be redeemed for money. And this kid, this second grader,
this eight-year-old, every day it goes out and collects cans and he just collected 700 pounds of
cans and turned them in and what he wanted to do with that money by a vending machine.
No, this kid turned a trash into dollars and he’s in second grade. The funny thing is this kid is
self-motivated to do this, right? Because if you tried to force your second grader to go out and collect
cans, you would have a knock on the door. I mean, it’s like your son, you know, he’s excited and
motivated to do this. And I think that’s great. The second grader, the reason it triggered this
memory is because he’s putting all the extra money he’s making from his venture into a Roth IRA as
well. Nice. That’s the way to do it. So my rule of money is after you’ve paid all your expenses,
used the rule of thirds, which is save a third in an easy-to-access savings account, invest a third,
long-term investments, and it’s blow a third. Have fun. Well, that’s good advice, except for the
part that if their expenses are equal to or exceed the income, there’s nothing left over. So you
have to start canceling stuff. Well, you have to add to your rule of the max what your expenses
should be, you know, to your income. So that I think I’d add one more. Less than.
Yeah. So well, maybe it needs to be like your expenses need to be kept under 50% of your income.
And then the rule of thirds can then apply to the other half of your income.
Well, I think if people use what we’ve talked about, take it to heart, about looking at their
self-storage and other things that they’re paying for and canceling subscriptions,
they’ll find a little bit of extra money. Yeah. Yeah, I’m super excited that that self-storage bill
is completely gone. But now the entire third bay of my garage is filled with kids’ memories that
my wife and I just sit down and go through. But it’s more likely to get done because it’s here at
the house and not the storage unit, that was another problem. The storage unit was 25 miles away.
And the reason it was 25 miles away is because we moved here in 2020, we had no idea where we were
going to live in this Phoenix Valley area. And so we just picked that storage unit because it
was a good deal. It was brand new. And then we just happened to live on the other side of the valley.
So not only was I paying $200 to store my stuff, but I was storing my stuff 25 miles away,
which means for sure I was never going to go down there. Well, you’ve heard that expression
out of sight out of mind. Yeah. Well, yours was out of sight out of money.
Yeah. But now that we have everything here, it would be a constant reminder every day,
we need to go through this so I can get my garage space back. Right. Or as now we can go through it,
we’re never going to go through it at the storage unit 25 miles away. Right. We’d never,
like, hey, let’s take a day and go hang out the storage unit and go through bins. We’d never do that.
I know we’d never do it. Picture scanner trash. That’s the next thing.
Picture scanner trash. Yep. Yep. There you go.
All right, Damon. Thank you so much for all your, your wisdom on self-storage.
I was going to say something else. Not kid friendly, but
think you’re all this wisdom that you’ve been getting pounding into my head for 20 years.
So it’s your wisdom. And it’s not like, here’s the funny thing. You know, logically,
everything you were saying, I’m like, you were right, logically. But it was the emotional side of
my brain that was just like, but I don’t want to deal with that. I don’t want to have to make
those decisions about what to get rid of. And I think that’s what traps a lot of people
into things like self-storage because they have things that they emotionally don’t want to
get rid of. But and I struggle with that. Like I’ve struggled with that my whole life. Again,
I’m not like on hoarders like on TV where you’re walking over trash when you come into my house,
but that’s why I have a storage unit in this game. I hide it. I hide it 25 miles away.
No, but what I can tell you is when I do get rid of things and I finally just like, I’m going to
get rid of this, I’ve never had a situation that I can remember where after I got rid,
I finally just like, okay, this stuff, it doesn’t make sense to keep signing, you’ve got to get rid
of this, I’ve got to sell it, I’ve got to just donate it to goodwill. I’ve never had a situation
where I’ve been like sad about it later. Which seems kind of weird, like why would you be sad about
stuff? But when you have emotional connections that things, but it’s always been this freeing feeling.
That one’s the sun. Yes. Wow, it’s done. Because when we did get that storage, when I had that
U-Haul trailer pulling all the stuff out the other week, I also filled it with a whole bunch of
stuff that was currently in my garage, things that we didn’t need could get rid of and I went to
the dump and I unloaded a whole trailer full of stuff at the dump and it felt great driving away.
That’s a whole trailer full of stuff that’s now just gone and not in my way and out of my life
and it made room for the new trailer full of stuff that came from the storage unit.
Well, every couple of years we rent one of those small dumpsters and just like go through the house
top to bottom and just throw out as much crap as we can.
Yeah, because like you said, at the end of the day, at the end of your life, or even if you’re like
at some point have to go to a assisted living, at some point I know people don’t like to think
about, especially if they’re only in their 40s or 50s or whatever, but it’s just going to become
a burden to your kid. Oh, I got some of my parents stuff that’s in the basement.
Yeah, and I think maybe, depending on how your kids are, like I have some of my grandparents
things, I have some of my parents things and those things, you know, I like, but it’s not,
you know, a whole storage unit full of stuff that you’re going to want to keep from your parents,
right? And so all, if you don’t do it, it’s just going to burden your kids because somebody will
have to do it someday. I mean, what am I going to do with my parents’ old yearbook?
And my daughter, you know, and her daughter, they don’t want it.
Yeah. At some point it’s going to end up in the trash.
Yeah, and if it’s eventually going to end up there, then you’ve got to ask yourself why am I paying
$200 or something? Right. The store. Hold on to just delaying the inevitable. It’s eventually
going to end up in the trash. Yeah. So why am I paying to, you’re essentially just paying, in my case,
$2,000, $2,400 a year to put off having to make that choice. That’s all it is.
Well, you were a good customer for the storage place while it lasted, but, you know, after a
couple of decades, it’s all going to come to an end. I’ve been joking for 20 years. I should
create my own storage facility. And the only reason I haven’t done it is because I’m moving
all over the place in the last 20 years. And it’s like, well, I create this perfect situation with
RV parking and my own storage. And then I can just utilize my own facility. And then I move to a
different container or something. Exactly. And now it’s like, oh. All right, Damon, thank you so much
until next time I will see you. Peace. Got a money question keeping you up at night? Well,
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