10 Surprising Statistics That Reveal How Much Stuff We Actually Own

(Excerpts from an article written by my colleague Joshua Becker)

I know that the summer is always a good time to tackle those big decluttering projects we might have put off during the school year. Well, if you were on the fence, these startling stats might just give you the motivation to get started.

There are 300,000 items in the average American home.
The average size of the American home has nearly tripled in size over the past 50 years.
1 out of every 10 Americans rent offsite storage - the latest growing segment of the commercial real estate industry over the past 4 decades.
25% of people with two-car garages don’t have room to park cars inside them and 32% only have room for one vehicle.
3.1% of the world’s children live in the USA, but they own 40% of the toys consumed globally.
Our homes have more television sets than people and those television sets are turned on for more than a third of the day.
Americans spend more on shoes, jewelry, and watches ($100 billion) than on higher education.
Over the course of a lifetime, we will spend a total of 3,680 hours or 153 days searching for misplaced items. The research found we lose up to nine items every day-or 198,743 in a lifetime. Phones, keys, glasses, and paperwork top the list.
Americans spend $1.2 trillion annually on nonessential goods—items they do not need.
The $8 billion home organization industry has more than doubled in size since the early 2000’s - growing at a staggering rate of 10% each year.

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