As a writer, I’m not paid weekly; I’m paid monthly. Every month, it’s a different amount, depending on my book sales. Once in a while, there’s a surge of sales, and I’m paid a lot more than usual.

That’s exciting, but it’s also dangerous, because it’s very tempting to take that money and buy new clothes, new bedding, new furniture….what I want to buy usually depends on the size of the windfall.

The true danger lies in the fact that I know how easily I fall into the trap of wanting more things, which is how I got into the overcluttered life in the first place. Not only was I good at accumulating stuff, but when I got new stuff, I often kept the old stuff because “We paid a lot for this,” or “Someone might need this.” That kind of thinking is one reason that I ended up with a big house full of stuff plus two full storage units. If you tend to let cash burn a hole in your pocket, you may be prone to accumulating stuff, too.

Even if you’re paid weekly, you can still end up with a windfall in the form of an annual bonus or a much-larger-than-expected tax refund. Then there are the larger sums: your Uncle Ernie leaves you $5,000 after he dies, or you finally win the state lottery’s $25,000 prize.

I immediately put extra cash into a savings account so I don’t spend it impulsively. But that doesn’t mean my brain has stopped thinking of ways to spend it. However, my family and I worked very, very hard to get rid of all our excess possessions, and we enjoy living in our small, clean, uncluttered house now. We do not want to go back to living with too much stuff. Sometimes it occurs to me that we could buy a house that’s a little bigger than what we have now, to accommodate our growing family of grandchildren when they visit. But I fear that a bigger house would just mean more places to accumulate things.

So what to do with the windfall? How can it benefit us without overloading us with the wonderful things it might buy? I’ll share some ideas next time.