You can deduct $1000 in CASH donations, not stuff.
On another note, I also need to organize better. I have a drawer of photos that you buy at various attractions. I scrapbook (digitally) and usually include in my albums for that trip. But I just ordered a traditional photo album and want to get all the pictures in there. We also just have the same random stuff all over the house. I don't know why we have various earbud type devices in 5 locations throughout the house (and we each use only one pair) so it's stuff like that to get them all in one spot and get rid of the ones we don't need.
so if you go through all of them you can identify which ones you actually need/want. we did this with cords and cables and other electronics of the like. ended up realizing how many were for long gone devices (proprietary), some were dangerously frayed. some we realized would serve us best with one household/backup/one in each vehicle-the rest (usable) went into a bag to goodwill (people search high and low for some outdated cords). when I would come across a random remote it went into an 'electronics junk drawer'-which we went through one day to eliminate a whole lot. I got rid of LOTS of stuff when we redid our primary closet-when everything came out and it smacked me in the face at how much was squirreled away it was easier to purge (same when we had to empty all our bathroom cabinets to replace the counters-ooooooh the stuff I did'nt realize was in there
).
Great plan, I'm going to try that. I love organizing and cleaning. DH not as much, you should see his face when we talk about what we'll do on a weekend day and I tell him we're organizing, but I need his help to go through stuff. But I know he has no desire to do it for hours like I would so I make it realistic like an hour we work. The other thing with the cords is, I have realized I am ordering extra when I don't need to. Can't find a particular cable, it's cheap on Amazon and will be here tomorrow. There's no reason to just do that because I don't know where something is.and this is what I've found is the best method to use to purge. go room to room, space to space with one category in mind and gather it into one box/container/area-then go through it. so much stuff is hung on to b/c you're unsure if you have one/a backup/a second backup
). after that I made a point of going through all our paperwork-figured out what we needed to keep/had the rest shredded. categorized into what needed to be kept for our lifetime/what might be needed to settle things/what could be shredded. now boxes in the safe are labeled. boxes in a storage area of our house that I might need but can go when we are gone that no one will need have large stickers within the shape of flames-sign to the kids to 'burn, burn, burn-don't even bother going through it'.They were handed down from her grandmother. Her grandmother used to display them every Christmas. I'd be divorced if I tried to sell/give away even a single one. Same thing with other heirlooms that were handed down to us by grandparents and parents. That's just stuff you can't get rid of.
