My Minimalist Living Journey: Trashing DVD Cases from Our Movie Collection

To work towards true financial independence, becoming detached from as many material items you own as possible is extremely important. The more you value possessions, the less you may value things in your life that really matter, like people. Also, you’ll end up spending more money on stuff you don’t need.

“The things you own end up owning you.” - Tyler Durden

On my path to living a more minimalist life, I downsized my clothing by almost half a few months ago, but the journey continues. I’m just as guilty as the next person with the amount of electronics and movies I have, but there is always a way to minimize the amount of space possessions take up. I decided to tackle our movie collection next.

The Purge

My fiancé and I combined our movie collection last weekend and we ended up having doubles of a few movies and some we didn’t want anymore. After having gone through both of  our sets of movies and asking whether we wanted to sell them on Half.com, donate to Goodwill, give to friends, or trade them on SwapADVD.com, we got it down to only the ones we wanted to keep.

Yes, we have a lot of movies. To minimize how much space they take up though, I bought a 320 disc CD/DVD case off Amazon and went to work.

Saying Goodbye

As I went through each individual case, took out the discs, and put them in the new mega-case, it was actually hard to part with the plastic cases (as silly as that sounds). Why did I care how these little disc cases looked on my bookshelf?

After slowly parting with a few of the Blu-Ray cases and realizing how ridiculous I was being, I went through the rest with no hesitation. Sometimes all it takes is making that difficult first step to accomplish a much bigger goal.

Why We Kept the Movies

Movies are a hobby that my fiancé and I are passionate about and it costs us nothing to keep the movies we already own. We have scaled back to buying movies only when we have gift cards for the past year and were Netflix member for a while until we got too busy wedding planning.

Buying movies is not an impulse we are susceptible to anymore. We are comfortable keeping the movies in this way so we can still enjoy them, while not having the clutter of over 200 plastic cases on our shelves.

The Takeaway

What does getting rid of plastic cases for movies have anything to do with financial independence? We have to disconnect ourselves from the false feelings of gratification from continually having more and better stuff. Until you can detach yourself from the things you own, you will continue to buy things you don’t need.

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Where in your life could you minimize your possessions without losing anything of value to you?