I first came across Marie Kondo during lockdown when I’d already binge-watched all seasons of Outlander, Virgin River, and Downton Abbey and was looking for other things to watch. One of my friends had been harping on about Marie Kondo and how she’s used the KonMarie method to really tidy up her home and her life.
For the uninitiated, Marie Kondo is a decluttering and organization expert who wrote a book, which in turn produced a Netflix series called Tidying Up with Marie Kondo. She built her whole career on one simple idea: go through everything you own, hold it up, and ask whether it sparks joy. If it does, keep it. If it doesn’t, thank it and let it go.
And the more I thought about that, the more I wondered why we don’t do the same thing with our money. Especially in retirement, when every dollar is being asked to stretch a little bit further than it used to. Could I KonMarie my finances as I prepare for retirement?
Because here’s what I’ve noticed about myself, and maybe you’ll recognize it too. I’m hemorrhaging money on the things I don’t even care about. The forgotten subscriptions, the auto-renewals, the convenience charges, the habit purchases.
And if I could clear all that out, there’d be a lot more breathing room for the things that I actually enjoy. Long lunches with friends, trips away, that writing retreat I’ve always wanted to do, and those French lessons I’ve been talking about doing.
How the KonMari Method Works When You Apply It to Money
Marie Kondo’s method has six rules and five categories, all designed for stuff. Clothes, books, papers, miscellaneous bits and pieces, and finally sentimental items. The genius bit is the order, because you start with the easy stuff and work up to the hard stuff, and by the time you get to the photo albums and the boxes of letters, you’ve gotten quite good at making decisions.
Money works exactly the same way. There’s easy money clutter, and there’s hard money clutter. And if you tackle them in the right order, you build up a bit of momentum, and by the time you get to the bigger emotional spending questions, you’ve already saved yourself a small fortune.
So I’ve adapted the five categories for your finances. We’ll go through them one at a time, and at the end, you should have a clearer picture of where your money is going, what you actually want it to do, and how to free up some cash for the things you always dreamed about doing in retirement.
Step One: Imagine Your Ideal Retirement Lifestyle
This is rule number two in the original KonMari method. Kondo tells you to sit down and picture the life you want before you start sorting through anything. It sounds a bit fluffy, but actually it’s the most useful part of the whole exercise.
So before you touch a single bank statement, sit with a cup of coffee and write down what you want retirement to look like. You don’t have to create a vision board; you can if you want to, but it isn’t mandatory. Just a list is fine.
Do you want to travel more? Do you want to be able to take the grandkids out more regularly? Do you want a small extension on the house? Do you want to learn pottery, take up sailing lessons, or eat out once a week with your partner?
This list becomes your filter for everything else. Because when you’re going through your spending later, the question isn’t “can I afford this?” The question is “Does this support the life I just described?” That’s the money version of sparks joy. And once you’ve got that list written down, every other decision gets a lot easier.
Step Two: Tackle the Subscriptions First
In the original method, you start with clothes because they’re the easiest category to be honest about. With money, subscriptions are the clothes. They’re the low-hanging fruit. The ones you forgot you signed up for, the ones that were free for three months and then started charging you, the ones you keep meaning to cancel but never quite get around to.
Sit down with your last three bank statements and highlight every single recurring payment. Streaming services, gym memberships, app subscriptions, magazine renewals, cloud storage, premium accounts on websites you signed up for once and never used again. All of it. Get it down on paper or on a spreadsheet, whichever you prefer.
Now go through each one and ask yourself the “spark joy” question. Are you actually using this? Does it add something to your life? If you canceled it tomorrow, would you miss it, or would you just shrug?
A few things to look out for as you go through them:
- Streaming services you double up on. A lot of people have Netflix, Prime, and one or two others, and they only really watch one. Pick the favorite, drop the rest, and you can always rotate them later if you want.
- Gym memberships you haven’t used in months. If walking and a YouTube yoga channel would do the job, you’ve just saved yourself a few hundred dollars a year.
- Free trials that turned into paid plans. Check the small charges, the $4.99s and the $7.99s. They add up faster than you think.
- Subscription boxes. The wine clubs, the snack boxes, the candle deliveries. Lovely when they arrive, but ask yourself honestly whether you’d buy them at full price if they weren’t on autopilot.
- Software and apps you used once. The photo editor for one project, the meditation app from January, and the language learning app from last summer.
Most people who do this exercise find they can release between $40 and $150 a month without changing anything about how they actually live. That’s $480 to $1,800 a year, just from saying goodbye to things you didn’t even realize you were paying for.
Step Three: The Pantry, the Freezer, and the Fridge
This is the kitchen equivalent of the komono category, the miscellaneous bits and pieces. And it might be the most surprising one in terms of how much money is hiding here.
Have a proper look at your pantry. I mean a real look. Pull everything out, line it up on the counter, and see what you’ve got. I did this a few months ago and discovered four jars of cumin, sixteen cans of baked beans, three packets of the same pasta, all opened and half used. And that’s just for starters.
The freezer is even worse. I have a tendency to buy things on offer, freeze them, and then completely forget they’re there until I’m doing the annual defrost.
So the question becomes, can you eat from your kitchen for a week before doing any grocery shopping? Most people can, and most people don’t. Try it. Plan three or four meals around what you already own, and only buy the fresh bits you need to make it work. You’d be amazed how much you save on a single grocery shop just by using what’s already in the house.
While you’re at it, look at where you do your shopping. A lot of retirees fall into a habit of going to the same supermarket out of routine, when there’s a cheaper one ten minutes down the road. Or they shop online and pay a delivery fee they don’t need to. Small tweaks here can save you another $50 to $100 a month, and your meals don’t have to change at all.
Step Four: The Bills and the Boring Bits
This is the papers category in the original method, and it’s the one people dread most. Insurance, utilities, phone plans, broadband, internet, and banking fees.
Set aside an afternoon to go through it all. Pour yourself something nice, put on some music, and treat it like a project rather than a chore. Here are the main areas to focus on:
- Phone plans. Most of us are on contracts we signed years ago, and the price has crept up while better deals appeared on the market. A quick call to your provider to ask what they can do for loyalty often gets you a discount. If not, switching is usually painless these days.
- Broadband and internet. Same story. Call the provider, tell them you’re considering switching, and see what they offer. Even ten dollars a month off is $120 a year.
- Insurance. Car, home, life, health. Get fresh quotes every year. The auto-renewal price is almost never the best price.
- Energy bills. If you’re in an area with a choice of providers, compare them. If you’re not, look at whether your usage has changed since you stopped working. You might be on a tariff that no longer suits you.
- Banking fees. Account fees, overdraft charges, and foreign transaction fees on the cards you use abroad. These are often easy to switch away from once you know what you’re paying.
It might be a bit painful, but it’s where the biggest single savings usually are. A few hours of phone calls and admin can knock $500 to $1,500 off your annual outgoings, and nothing about your day-to-day life changes.
Step Five: The Sentimental Spending
This is the hardest category, and it’s the one Marie Kondo puts at the end for a reason. By the time you get here, you’ve practiced making decisions, you’ve gotten used to the spark joy question, and you’re ready for the trickier conversations.
Sentimental spending is everything you buy for emotional reasons rather than practical ones. The treat purchases. The shopping you do when you’re bored, sad, or simply scrolling. The gifts you feel obliged to buy, the clothes you order online on impulse, or the things you ordered because one of your friends had one.
I’m not going to tell you to stop any of this, because some of it is wonderful and you’ve earned it. But the spark joy question matters more here than anywhere else. When you bought that thing, did it actually bring you joy? Or did the joy last about twenty minutes and then turn into another item on the shelf?
The trick is to be honest about which purchases actually do bring you ongoing happiness and which ones are just filling a gap. Maybe a really good coffee out twice a week makes you happier than ten cheap impulse buys online.
Perhaps a once-a-month dinner with friends does more for your well-being than a wardrobe full of things you wear once. The goal is not to spend less, but to spend on what actually matters.
What To Do With the Money You Free Up
Here’s the bit people get wrong. They go through all this, then funnel every dollar they save back into the savings account, and end up feeling like they’ve punished themselves rather than freed themselves up. The whole point of the KonMari approach is that what you keep matters more than what you discard.
So once you’ve cleared out the clutter, decide what you want the freed-up money to go toward. Some of it should absolutely go into savings, especially if retirement is still a few years away. But some of it should go toward the list you wrote earlier. The travel, the meals out, the hobbies, the small luxuries that make life fun and make you feel good.
If you’ve saved $200 a month from subscriptions and bills, maybe $100 of that goes into the retirement pot and $100 into a “joy fund.” A separate little account that you actively spend, guilt-free, on the things you decided mattered that’s on your list or vision board.
That’s the magic of doing it this way. You’re not skimping or depriving yourself, you’re just being deliberate about where the money goes. The same amount of cash, but suddenly it feels like more, because none of it is being wasted on things you don’t care about.
A Few Things to Remember as You Go
The original KonMari method takes weeks or months, and the money version is the same. Don’t try to do everything at once. Pick a category, work through it properly, and then move on.
Also, do it with someone if you can. If you have a partner, this works much better as a joint exercise, because money decisions in retirement usually involve both of you. And if you’re doing it on your own, tell a friend what you’re up to, as it helps with accountability.
Finally, be kind to yourself about the past. There’s no point looking at three years of forgotten gym memberships and feeling bad. We’ve all done it. The point of the exercise isn’t to beat yourself up about the money you’ve already spent. It’s to make sure the money you’ve still got is doing what you actually want it to do.
Retirement is supposed to be the reward for decades of hard work, and the whole reason for going through this process is so you can spend more on the things you love and less on the things you don’t even notice.
Disclaimer: This article is for general information only and is not financial advice. For decisions about your specific retirement situation, please speak with a qualified financial advisor.