Where you look around, people have stuff. Stuff they need to live, stuff they hope to use and stuff that when the are deceased 97% will go into the trash. If you look at homeless people they have stuff; people rent storage lockers for stuff that will not fit into their homes. It is the reason why at least once a year, magazines will have articles on how to declutter. In theory, there is less and less reasons to keep paper – it can be scanned and put on the cloud and you can access even easier. In practice, many of us still have stuff. One book on the subject is Clutter’s Last Stand by Don Aslett published by Adams Media, Avon, Mass, 2005. First edition published in 1984. Mr. Aslett’s book is filled with helpful hints such as we only regularly use 20% of the stuff we have, is it possible to reduce the other 80%. In this day and age, if you only need something for a limited time, renting is an option. By keeping something it ages, if you keep it for long enough it will be an antique, the bigger question is there a market to buy it from you and recover the costs of keeping? If there is no market, do you really want to hold on to it? If you have not worn clothing in 10 years, we all have our favourites, should they be let go? No one says it is easy and if you ever had a fire, you would miss some of the stuff, but be thankful people are safe and healthy.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, part of the reason for the subject is sometimes as investors we accumulate lots of investments. Unfortunately, some people accumulate investments that is doubles and triplicate of their primary holdings. Many of us hold Mutual Funds as well as individual stocks, if you thought you were diversifying are the objectives of the funds similar? Besides to make more money, are they following similar paths? Perhaps you should sell them with limited loss to yourself (every year you can redeem some with no penalty) and really diversify your holdings.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions