When you stop to take a serious look around your home, you may find yourself shocked by just how much stuff you own! Most of us know that we need to make the time to have a serious declutter but finding the motivation to do this can be a little on the hard side. If you’re searching for something to get you motivated and to start a process of lifestyle simplification, it’s worth bearing in mind that your clutter can be used as a great way to make extra money.

It’s not just about making extra money though. The truth is that clutter can have an impact on our mental health. With a house jam-packed, our brain gets a little overwhelmed and the only solution is to start to declutter sooner rather than later.

Not sure how to declutter or how you can use this process to make extra money? Fear not: we’re here to help.

Make extra money from your clothes

If you’re anything like most people, there’s a very good chance that you have a wardrobe stuffed full of clothes that you’re just never going to wear again. Maybe your size and shape have changed or perhaps it’s your taste that has altered. Either way. how long do you really need to hang on to that dress, or pair of boots, that you last wore when Friends Reunited was the only form of social media?

Yes, there may be a connection with some items of clothing but if you want to explore lifestyle simplification, and if you want to make extra money, you need to be ruthless. Some of the best places to sell on your clothing include the likes of:

• Vinted

• Depop

• Vestiaire Collective

Raid the kid's clothes too

It’s not just your own clothes that are taking up valuable space in your home. If you have any children you’ve probably also got a hoard of clothes that they’ve gradually grown out of. Now, we’re not suggesting that a declutter should involve ridding your home of outfits that have sentimental value, but do you really need to be hanging on to every single pair of trousers that the apple of your eye has ever worn?

If you want to declutter and make extra money at the same time, then selling on kid's clothes is easy. Again, Vinted is a great marketplace to explore but there are also sites that specialise in children’s clothes such as Dotte.

Declutter your bookshelf

We all have our favourite book titles but it’s easy to find a home being overrun with books and to quaky run out of space on your bookshelf. When it comes to books, you may just decide to donate these to a charity shop or maybe pass them on to family and friends. However, if you want to take extra money from your unwanted books, the good news is that you can do this too.

There are sites such as We Buy Books that will give you a good idea of what your books may be worth. You’ll also find that books still sell well on sites such as eBay and Amazon. If you’ve got old books used for study at uni, you can make good money from these at AbeBooks.

Visit your jewellery box

If you’ve got items of jewellery that you just never wear then it surely makes sense to have a good declutter session and sell these on. Of course, you don’t want to be selling pieces that have an emotional attachment, but you can bet there are pieces that you haven’t worn for years now.

You can sell jewellery with ease over at eBay as well as sites such as Vintage Cash Cow. If your jewellery is made of gold, you may profit even more by exploring companies that melt items down and pay you for the value of the metal rather than the piece itself.

Make extra money from unwanted gadgets

When was the last time that you rummaged through your draws? If you do it now, we’re fairly confident that you’ll come across an unused mobile phone, an old laptop or some other gadget that you just have no further need for. If you start to delve into cupboards and wardrobes, you may even stumble across old game consoles that haven’t seen the light of day for an age.

These types of items are easy to sell and that makes the declutter process almost fun. You can sell these types of items on sites such as eBay, Envirofone and Music Magpie.

Declutter your furniture

point, that huge coffee table suited your needs or that you really needed a dining table that could seat 12 people. As times and circumstances change why not look at lifestyle simplification and do away with such things?

Big and bulky furniture isn’t always the easiest to sell. If you want to give this a try you should check out Facebook Marketplace and Gumtree. If all else fails, and if you’re committed to seeing through your desire to declutter, you could even donate to a local charity shop.

An extreme declutter

If you’ve really bought into the idea of decluttering your home then you might want to take things a little further. While you may want to make extra money, you might not want to wait the time that it takes to sell certain items. If that’s the case, and you have a lot of clutter around, why not invest in a storage unit for the short term?

By doing this you can literally transform how your home appears and you can give your mental health a great boost. Just don’t then go on to forget about your clutter. You don’t want to be paying for storage over the long term so you still need to be exploring the sites that we’ve covered so that your declutter experience makes you money rather than costs you.