Reducing Stock

Stocking up on things is good.. as long as you use them!

I know that one of the things I think many people are doing more often these days is stocking up on things. Not that people ever really STOPPED doing that, but I think the mindset shifted away from that for a few years or decades. Lately though, especially since the supply chain issues of a few years ago, people have gotten smarter with their stuff and started to make sure they were covered.

We followed suit, and started to stock up on things that we needed or used over the years. Plenty of canned goods and boxed things. Lots of vitamins and things like that. One of the things that it seems we forgot a little bit was to then use said things we stocked up on.. so I've been on a mission lately!

It's a strange thing, the satisfaction one gets from going through the cabinets and other areas to find things that we need to use before it goes bad. Some of it even is "expired" but if it's not something like meat or dairy, I give it some liberties in terms of if it's truly expired or not. That vitamin D that "expired" in 2023? Yeah I'm not throwing that shit away, I'm using it up! LOL. That has been my focus the last few months.

In the process, I've really been able to trim the hell down on all of the things that are in the cabinets, and all of the vitamins and supplements we've accumulated over time. A bunch of those vitamins and supplements of course aren't something that I NEED to take, but I'm also not going to waste them. The Lysine combo with garlic and vitamin C? It's primarily for when you are feeling sick, but at the same time, there were 3 bottles of it.. it was a great thing to stock up on and it was one of the things to start chipping away at.

There are many examples of that, such as the essential oils that we accumulated just as much. For a bit there, we had about 50 bottles of the things! That was far too much haha but I've been using them in the shower every day. I actually enjoy adding a little aroma to the shower, strangely enough now lol.

There are plenty of other examples of things that we got that it was good to stock up on, but at the same time it's also very important to use what we've got otherwise we just threw the money out the window. That's one of the interesting things about the mindset a lot of us have. We want to stock up on things, but sometimes we do that just to stock up instead of stocking up and then consuming through it.

There were certainly a few things that were in the cabinet like a jar of mayonnaise that truly did expire last year, and it was NOT white.. it was this gross off-yellow color now so that was for sure going to give me listeria or some shit hahaha that got tossed! For the most part though, a lot of the things that we buy are pretty shelf stable which is great. It helps to try and take inventory of what needs to be consumed through every few days and start plugging away.

Hopefully I can have most of the cabinets cleared out by June!

What about you, have you stocked up on things over time? Have you used them or ended up throwing them away? Let me know in the comments!