5 Things to Let Go of This Month + Make Room For More

January is all about “detoxing” amiright?

Everything we see and hear and read is about setting those New Year resolutions: shedding the extra weight and calories, ridding ourselves of the toxins we put into our body all holiday season (or all year long), reactivating those gym memberships, and all around just trying to put our best foot forward to becoming our best selves.

I’m with it. Personally, I love the start of any new month, but especially the first of January. It’s a clean slate to set great intentions for the year.

I’m not about pressuring myself into totally changing who I am, but I’m a goal digger, and I will try my hardest to better myself in some way or another.

So this year, this month is all about letting go: of the tangible and the intangible.

You could call it “detoxing” but it’s so much more than cutting sugar out of my life. It’s decluttering, minimizing, reducing, and straight up throwing shit out.

And because everything I do relates to “how can I afford this next trip” and saving/planning for a new adventure (this is a travel blog after all!), my “letting go” also has a lot to do with “making room” for something else: mental space, more money in the bank, more room in my carry-on.

The 5 buckets below are the “things” I’m letting go of this month in an effort to declutter my life (because let’s be real, life itself can get crowded with, life, and it’s good to shed the excess) and make room for something bigger.

Like, maybe that trip to Thailand, or something just as grand!

Let go of drinking.

I’ve never successfully completed it before, but this time I’ve committed myself to Dry January, and I have every intention of doing it full out. Besides giving my liver a break and cutting back on the champagne pumping through my veins, my wallet should also reap the benefits this month.*

*This month, because God knows I already need a drink and will be back on the bandwagon soon. Maybe just more mindfully?

Downsize the closet.

All of those shirts and pants and things sitting in your closet unworn for a year have got. to. go. No point in keeping them if they’ll never see the light of day. Plus you can sell them for some extra $$ if they’re lightly worn, on Poshmark or at Buffalo Exchange in NYC. And if no one wants them, donate them. Someone can always use them.

Let go of clutter.

Beyond the 4 garbage bags of clothes (yes, 4) that I shed from my closet, I also seem to accumulate a lot of stuff. Papers and notebooks from years ago, makeup that’s older than time, magazines, ticket stubs, out of style hair accessories, I could go on. So I ditched everything of the sort.

I honestly get so much joy out of decluttering and letting go of things I’m holding on to for no reason. Try it.

Trim subscriptions.

We sign up for services and then forget about them. The problem with that is, they’re slowly eating at our funds. $5 here and $2.99 there adds up every month, and it hurts even worse if it’s going unused.

If you sign up for Trim (it’s free), they’ll scan your checking and credit card accounts, then deactivate any subscriptions you don’t really want. Be honest with yourself when you’re reviewing this stuff. If you’re not really using it (like, Classpass or Rosetta Stone), then lose it. Cha-Ching.

Unroll in emails.

This might not affect your bottom line at all, but the mental clarity is worth it TIMES 10.

Email subscriptions and newsletters are actually fucking annoying when you don’t care about them or read them. And I’m convinced they multiply overnight. But it’s super annoying to manually unsubscribe from every single one.

Sooo use Unroll.me (also available as an app!) to do the work for you. Just ONE of my 4 email addresses had 200+ subscriptions. Click. Boom. Gone. Then you can actually read all the great newsletters you want (cough, my e-newsletter) and not miss major emails (like that JetBlue sale).