An average of seven times

A blog I occasionally read cited a study that says on average, we wear our clothes seven times before we discard them one way or another.*

At first I thought no way, that’s not what I do! I wear my clothes way more than seven times before they’re gone. As Kent pointed out, if you buy a season-specific item of clothing (say, a light sleeveless top), you’d have to wear it at least once a week for the entire season to hit seven wearings. If you chose ultra-cheap clothing (think H&M or the like), chances are good that the top might not last more than one season.

I was still skeptical. After all, I have a Gap jean jacket I bought at an outlet mall in Nashville, TN in September 2006 that I still wear almost every week. I have shoes from before our flood in October 2009 that I still wear—or what about that leather jacket I got at that one high end consignment store in Boston (think it was 2008)?

I also have a really lovely long dress I got earlier this year; I planned to take it to Jamaica only we didn’t go and I still haven’t worn it. It’s still got the tags on it. A couple of years ago, I got a maxi skirt—black with white polka dots. Super cute and totally not me. I wore it maybe four times before I donated it.

Ever since I read that article, I’ve been mentally tracking how often I wear the things in my closet. Some of them are total work horses. I wear them frequently and year-round. In fact, a lot of my clothes are that way.

I’ve also got some things that I don’t wear as often. This summer, I’ve been reaching for those items deliberately, wearing them again. After all, I paid for them so I might as well get the cost per wearing down while increasing my average number of times wearing the darn things.

*Despite searching, I couldn’t find the blog post I mentioned. This takes you to the one article I could find. 

It’s the small things

In keeping with my strong desire to focus on the positive (rather than freak out which does no good anyway), here’s a list of random things for which I’m grateful:

• We deliberately chose to buy a less expensive house, one that we could pay for with the smaller of our two salaries
• We left Verizon last month and switched to Google Fi which cut our cell phone bill in half (we did have to get new phones but we were on the hook for new phones anyway)
• We don’t have any recurring subscriptions to anything—no cable, no Netflix, no Hulu, nothing
• We both know how to cook and are quite good at it (sounds snotty but it’s true)
• We don’t have a habit of eating out (with the exception of our date night on Friday nights—we’ll be dialing those back but not cutting them out altogether)—I bring my lunch every day to work
• We have a good emergency fund saved up
• We paid cash for our cars so we don’t have car payments
• (This will sound weird) I recently bought new underwear—because of the stress at work, I’ve dropped four to five clothing sizes and those didn’t fit anymore. The good part here is I already bought them.

So there’s my list of random goodness. Also here's another cat picture to sooth us all.

Taken on my lap just now