075. Top Decluttering Tips and Tricks I Shared with Bernadette Joy

What do decluttering your home and your finances have in common? More than you think.

In this special interview-style episode, I sat down with financial coach and author Bernadette Joy, whose CRUSH method helps people declutter their money goals and design a life with more freedom — financial and otherwise. We talked about how clutter shows up in our homes and our heads, and how you can start organizing both in a way that actually supports your life.

🎧 You’ll hear:

• What to do when you’re holding onto “perfectly good stuff”
• How to use your space (and your spending) with intention
• Why we hang on to things for emotional reasons and how to gently let go
• How to find your “just right” amount of organization (and stop overdoing it!)
• Bernadette’s 5-step CRUSH framework and how it parallels my CLEAR-5 system
• What kids, spouses, sentimental keepsakes, and even makeup stashes teach us about our values

This episode is packed with real talk, laughs, and useful strategies, especially if you’re in a season of transition and feeling like the stuff is getting in the way.

📚 Learn more about Bernadette and her book CRUSH Your Money Goals, which Oprah named one of the Top 10 Books for Personal Growth in 2025! 

Amazon --> https://a.co/d/clXKxAb

🎁 Want to declutter your kitchen this weekend — without overwhelm?

Join the waitlist for my free class:

👉 3 Simple Steps to Declutter Your Kitchen in a Weekend --> https://fireflybridge.com/update

Get on the wait list for my FREE class: 3 Steps to Painlessly Declutter your Kitchen in just a Weekend! This is how you get no-cry mornings and calm evenings in your kitchen. And I'll show you how you can do it in just a weekend without overwhelm and without getting stuck. And, of course, you'll learn how to make sure the clutter doesn't come back with minimal effort. Go to https://fireflybridge.com/update and get on the wait list!

Connect with me:

You can find me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fireflybridgeorganizing
Here's my website: https://fireflybridge.com

Call or text me: 305-563-2292

Email me: zeenat@fireflybridge.com

Transcript

Hey guys, welcome back to Organizing for Beautiful Living. This is episode 75, and this week, I’m sharing the conversation I recently had with Bernadette Joy on her YouTube channel.

Bernadette is a Financial Coach, and financial educator. She’s written a book called Crush Your Money Goals, which Oprah named one of the top 10 books for personal growth in 2025! 

What’s so cool about Bernadette - well, there are many cool things about her - but one of the cool things about her is that she teaches people, and get this, how to Declutter their finances!

So we talked about decluttering our homes in a unique way here, and I wanted you all to hear it.

Because like in math class, sometimes, something doesn’t click for us when we hear it a certain way, but it does if we just hear it slightly differently.

So have a listen, or watch if you’re watching on YouTube, it’s a slightly longer episode than usual because it’s interview-style, but let me know if hearing these decluttering tips following Bernadette’s 5 steps of her CRUSH process made you think of things a little differently, ok? Here we go.

Hello hello we are back for another episode of Crush Your Money Goals and I am super excited for this topic because it's because it's something near and dear to my heart, which is really how do you live your best life and organize yourself in a way that you don't feel stressed and cluttered and feel like total crap about where you live and so I would like to introduce you to my new friend and we met at a podcast conference and I didn't know that you could have a podcast on such a topic and so it was so exciting for me to meet her and to introduce all of you to her on her big tips and she is a wealth of knowledge. What's so funny about the day that we met at the podcast conference is that I sat in on your session thinking of finances and understanding and I was very excited about your book. And so I'm sitting in there and then you start talking about "We need to declutter our finances!" and I thought 'wait a minute, this is exactly what people need to hear.' So I was super excited to sit through the session, to read your book. It was amazing and to find the parallels between what you do and what I do so thank you very much for having me on. Thank you so much and I um love that you heard those parallels i've gone through phases of being like super obsessed with this topic and and so it was a nice I'll say re like cyclical thing for me to meet you in this stage of my life because I just told you right before we got on this conversation that I just moved and I actually downsized from a two-bedroom now down to a one-bedroom with the hopes of being really to fully move abroad so I was like "Oh my gosh it's perfect timing to talk to you and get some tips for others if you're in a transition in your life and you're realizing the stuff is getting in the way of that transition." Since many people are meeting you for the first time here can you tell us a little bit more about what it is that you do and how you do it yeah so when you hear the word professional organizer you think of somebody coming into your house and helping you declutter make your pantry look pretty and things are matching and yes that's a large part of what I do my ultimate goal is to find that sweet spot for people where they're living with what they need where their stuff isn't burdening them by decluttering their stuff it helps open up more possibilities for them because you're less you have less things happening in your mind when your environment is in order and so that's my goal with people we are so aligned on that for sure and similarly when you declutter your finances there's so much more that your mind can be able to process and create and heal from and so we are going to walk through the five steps of crush and talk about how organizing really can help you crush your money goals but also design the life that you want so the first letter in crush stands for curate your accounts so C equals curate your accounts and one of the things that I have noticed about my clients is that just as how they might be cluttered in their finances it tends to show a parallel in their homes and so I'd love to get some insight from you on how we can be better curators within our homes versus what I call collectors a lot of people feel that one side of their lives is very much in order so for example I was an engineer and so I was very meticulous at work everything was in order at work at home that wasn't the case and so I felt like my home didn't really reflect who I wanted to be and how I wanted to live my life and a lot of it was because of what you just said i was collecting things so what we tend to do is we tend to accumulate in the early part of our careers as we live our lives or we buy homes we have children and that kind of thing and where we need to start understanding that this is becoming an issue is when the things that we own are no longer always serving us so you might have the collection of dishes beautiful platters that you pull out once a year are those serving you well absolutely if you're going to use them once a year and you love using them you love taking them out and seeing them and putting them away where it becomes an issue is when you have 30 coffee mugs and you only use three do you really need the other and you can start small it's not to say that you need to look at your entire home or you've been living there for 10 years and think "Oh my gosh I've got to get rid of a bunch of my stuff." Start with the coffee mugs and really think about what do I want to keep not how many things can I get rid of to make space but what do I want to keep and why am I wanting to keep it and the way that I make it easier to focus on that is to limit so I just like you use the acronym crush I use the acronym clear clarify limit edit assign and review when we are decluttering and organizing and that limit the L for limit is lit very simply the space you are going to allow you are going to allow for a certain item so for my coffee mugs it's this little section of this cabinet and when my coffee mugs go beyond that I have to make a decision am I going to take up space from something else to keep this extra coffee mug or am I okay with getting rid of that coffee mug you can start making very simple decisions about what you're choosing to keep versus accumulating and collecting i love that that actually leads me naturally into the RN crush which is reversing into independence and I felt this personally as we were going through this move right now where my husband and I have been thinking about moving abroad for the last year or so and then it just felt like a really big leap specifically because of the stuff and when I say that in the sense of just what are we going to do with our couch and what are we going to do with our dining room table and what are we going to do with all these clothes i actually pride myself as a minimalist to a certain degree i've been able to downsize from like a four bedroom to a two-bedroom and so I didn't think that going from a two-bedroom to one bedroom would be really difficult but I found it to be in some cases harder than that first big downsizing because I thought that I had moved on from that like holding on to stuff because it's still good it's still useful and I realized that I didn't and so when I ask you about the reversing into independence how do you start freeing that mindset of holding on to stuff just because it's still good and useful even if you're not using it anymore and maybe if you have an example of a client or a personal example of where you were able to like you said limit and let go that it created more freedom for you this morning I was speaking to someone his name is Andre and he was telling me that in his home they're looking to purchase a new home and the spaces the homes that they've seen and the homes that they've bid on so far all have much less storage space than their current home and he is a collector of books he loves having books everywhere his office is filled with books but now his home is also filled with books and it became very clear this morning that in order for his family to be able to move into a new home something has to give and the biggest culprit of taking up space is his collection of over 700 books and so we started to talk about what's important about why are you keeping these books what prevents you from saying "Hey these books are available at the library online and in ways that you don't have to collect and keep." The mindset that we fall into the first thing that happens is our stuff tends to expand into the space that we have and it's only when all of a sudden we are faced with I don't have that much space anymore does the stress of oh my gosh now I've got to get rid of all this stuff that I love and I don't know if I can do it and it's a real stress it really hurts when we have to realize that this represents money that I've spent and I don't want to get rid of it i've spent money on this it represents money but and you've said this before what we have in our homes yeah it was money but it is no longer money that money is gone you've spent it on this item now the idea is how do you move forward so if Andre's goal is to move into a new house the idea is let's take some time to think about yes I've spent money and I've spent time on all of these books but is this really where I want what I want to shove into my new home is my home going to be going to feel the way that I want to feel if my entire home is lined with books and my kids don't have a real place to space to play so it's things like that the those are the questions that I ask people when we start to talk about okay let's think about what you want to keep and what is okay to let go of it's a process and it might takes some people much longer than other people to decide but I love that you were thinking that you guys are going to move abroad isn't that the greatest kick in the pants ever to think about oh my gosh I need to be able to move around in two suitcases and how can I do that and that's the most freeing thing ever for me that's how I want my house to be and I get it i would love to be able to say I want to spend six months in Alaska next year and all I want to bring with me is the important stuff two suitcases and not have to worry about anything else and so that to me is like the ultimate independence everyone has a different idea of what their independence is but that's how we have to start thinking about it what's important and letting go of the idea that I've spent money on this and it's worth something that's not going to help you that's not going to help you choose what belongs in your life yeah i It pains me i think that the worst pain I have when I'm letting go of stuff is like in particular are clothes or shoes that I've only worn like once or twice and it was like expensive and but like it doesn't look good or it doesn't feel comfortable like I have this pair of heels that I keep carrying around with me even though every time I wear them I wanted to cry i want to die and so I I still have some work to do on that i'm like really motivated today and one of the one of the greatest things is to say okay who could use this who could I gift this to or what organization can I gift it to there are all those organizations that are providing kids with outfits for prom or outfits to have interviews in you can help others even though it is painful to get rid of these things you have a way to help others and that might help ease the pain a little bit yeah so speaking of like worth and like thinking about how objects are worth a certain thing the U in crash stands for understanding your worth and net is in parentheses because the conversation around net worth and self-worth is often intertwined and I'm so curious have you come across people whose self sense of self-worth is very much tied to these like material goods and like how do you separate that so I worked with Dan a client a couple of years ago and I remember very clearly he said "I have these bins and boxes of notebooks textbooks research papers that I worked on from my college days at a Ivy League university and I'm keeping these and I'm hoping maybe my kids want to see them they don't fit in my house." And I had to tell him okay your diploma that physical diploma even without it you are still a graduate of that school that is still your legacy that you can pass on to your kids all of the research that you did all of the knowledge that you have you can still pass that on to your kids without hanging on to the textbook which is by now likely obsolete after 30 years so so we start there that the physical thing is not you even without the physical thing you are still you still have that identity and that is really where we have to begin with some of things that are really sentimental like that this is so interesting i had a company called Dressed where I would rent out dresses for women for special occasions and like part of my love of decluttering was taking these dresses from other women's closets and being like "Let me borrow these let me rent them out to other people and then you can have it back whenever you want them and there was this woman one time I'll never forget it and she had she had like orthopedic surgery and she had a massive shoe collection like hundreds and hundreds of shoes and and so somehow like one of my clients reached out to me she said "I have this client who has like hundreds and hundreds of these shoes and she literally cannot wear them anymore they just they don't fit her feet anymore and can you help me help her get rid of them and if I was like doing the math if each of these shoes are like $200 cuz they were like expensive shoes this is like thousands and thousands of dollars of shoes I could like physically feel the pain that she had as I was like carrying these boxes out of her house not only from the perspective of Yeah that was money spent but also there was this like chapter of her life that was closed that she can't wear high heels anymore yes just because you can't wear high heels doesn't mean you're not sexy like just because you don't have research papers doesn't mean that you're not smart so I love that example and that leads me into the S in crush which is to spend intentionally oftentimes we always talk about saving money but I'm curious if you think there's anything worth splurging on like to spend intentionally in order to keep a really like organized and like peaceful home listen I call myself a lazy organizer like I will do everything in my power to not have to keep organizing my house all the time like it's my job and I love to help other people do it but good lord I want to be done i don't want to be every day have something else to organize my feeling is splurge on what makes you excited on what makes you happy okay high heel shoes really expensive high heel shoes that make you feel fantastic do you want to splurge on those sure you can it's a choice that you're making but you're making it very intentionally i'm splurging on these shoes i know how much money I'm spending on these and I know how much space they are taking in my the things that are in your house they are paying for rent so when I'm thinking about buying something I think about is this guy going to pay his worth in rent in the end am I going to use these shoes enough or do they make me feel amazing enough that I want to keep that guy in my house for a long time or a short amount of time it's up to you but it's a very intentional decision that you have to make and your house is a certain square footage whether you're paying rent or whether you're paying mortgage you're paying for that space so fill it wisely fill it with stuff that you love just be very clear that you are spending that amount of money that that depth of money on that light fixture and make sure that it's paying its worth in rent i love that now I just want like I'm so curious if you want to spill the tea on this are there things that are there common trends of things that you see people like consistently regret spending money on regret oh my gosh it's when people are going past the childbearing years when your kids are in high school and there there aren't as many little kitty things around there's a real grief process that happens right you're like "Oh that entire stage of my life is done my little kids aren't going to be so little anymore." And then they look at the volume of little baby clothes baby books that they've kept as memories over the years and it is bins and bins of stuff because every little outfit and lovely little pair of socks has meaning and so I'm not saying that it's necessarily a regret but eyes are typically open when they look at the amount of baby gear baby clothes baby toys baby electronics that they spent money on over the childhood years some of it is worthwhile some of it may not be in the end but I think that's for my clientele are typically moms and that's a lot of what I hear wow i didn't realize how much we spent on some of this stuff that they only wore once but it was so special that I wanted to keep it but I you still spent money on it and so I hear a lot mhm i as a non-Mom I'm very curious your take on this how much of like all that baby stuff and like childing stuff is like function versus Keeping Up with the Joneses listen I'll tell you my own experience yeah like 90% of it was keeping up with the Joneses but also oh my gosh if my kid doesn't have this and this and this they're not going to be as developed by the time kindergarten comes around and then how are they going to get into the gifted program and then how are they going to get into college and the child is two years old wow that was a path you just took me on listen no oh and I was just talking to Andre about it because he has a preschooler and an infant and he was already talking about languages if she's going to be going into a a gifted program or in kindergarten then she immediately she needs to learn English now so that she's on par with all the other kids because they are non-English speakers at home and they want their kids to be bilingual triilingual whatever but he was really concerned about and I tell you I was concerned about it too when my kids were two and three are they going to get into the right kindergarten and do they have all this stuff to develop them so the toys the puzzles that develop the motor skills do they have the newest one because new research came out that they need to learn how to zip a zipper quickly all of these things that I spent money on and now I'm like really i could have just given her my jacket to practice zipping up a zipper but we just don't think about those we don't think about the alternatives because we want the best okay that leads me into the agent crush which I'm sure that I've heard this from some of my clients that some of their kind of overspending on their kids is a reaction to what they feel like they didn't get as a child themselves or like trying to make up for parenting that they didn't get the first question around healing your money wounds the last letter in crush is what kind of wounds do you see getting opened up and then subsequently healed through the organizing process and in particular there are two two types of people that I would love to hear your thought on the first one is on like aging parents and I'm saying this selfishly as I've had to go through the process of watching my mom and then watching my in-laws like transition homes like later in life and it was painful and it still is painful right now to get them to get rid of stuff so what is your take on why that might be happening and like what are some practical steps for a family to go through that process we know that a lot of this is generational and it's based on the era that someone grew up in and like you said their past experiences so for our parents in that generation scarcity was a real thing it wasn't just we might not have toilet paper tomorrow it was like we need to keep this piece of string because who knows when we're going to find a piece of string when we need it it things were not as prolifered out there in in the marketplace as they are now and so that tendency continues my mom keeps every box plastic bag Amazon package every single one because she quote unquote knows that she will use it to repackage something to send as a gift to to send in the mail and so she has a closet full of this packaging that she's keeping and I will look at that and say "Oh my word." Like why would you keep when you need a box you ask somebody you ask a neighbor hey do you have a little box I can borrow but that's not the mentality that they have and so we have to understand that as organizers we are very conscious of that and we are very careful about how we approach these things because it does cause a lot of pain and so when I work with seniors who are going through a transition I understand that their entire life is changing it's not just the stuff but it's also their life style is now changing their home is no longer necessarily the giant hub of where all the kids are now going to continue to gather and bring all their stuff and where all the memories live now they're switching homes into some something new and so as a child of an aging parent myself I have to keep in mind that the thing I want my mom to remember is that this new part of her life will create new memories in a new place they'll be different yes but they can be just as unique and as beneficial as the entire part of her life until now but it will change and we as kids we have to be conscious of that it's difficult and we get frustrated because we're like oh my gosh why are you keeping 50 pens that's a very it's a visceral feeling of I must keep this because it's wasteful for me not to and I may not find a pen when I need it again i can relate to everything that you said and then the second thing asking for a friend is what do you do when you and your spouse have different views on what is useful and what is not and what you should keep when you're downsizing hypothetically hypothetically there's a lot of compromise my husband keeps every cord and he we laugh about this all the time now it's frustrating for me and for him because I these old electronics and old adapters and old cords and I know I I know because I know everything because I know everything that he will never use those again no one will ever need those again he knows because he knows everything that will come in handy one day and so we've compromised i call it the his black box of doom it's a big plastic bin and all the electronic stuff goes into that one box and it stays in this particular cabinet and if that box gets full and things start like again we got to think about the limit of the clear process that's the limit for all this stuff and if things get full you've got to go through and make space if you're going to add other stuff to it so that kind of compromise it's not easy it took me all this time to get here i no longer have strong attachments to things that people might consider sentimental like greeting cards and art that my kids made when they were little i don't have a whole lot of sentimental attachment to that yeah I have pictures of everything and the memories are beautiful when I look at those pictures love that but I don't need it however I know other members of my family they do need that still and so we just have to work with the limit of the space that we have in our home or whatever home we're going into next and that's how we approach the process i love it of decluttering i love it okay so I thought it'd be fun just to ask you some like quick rapid fire questions of basically just your kind of like first thought on certain things and so when it comes to organizing like stream of consciousness kind of thing of okay first question would be like those clear containers that everyone like makes use to make your place super pretty worth it or not worth it you're that like the first question right off the bat is okay not worth it until you have decluttered once you've decluttered and you see what you have then you decide do I need a clear bin for this or can it just sit in the drawer without it i tell you I've gone to a house where they've bought all the beautiful bins and spent thousands of dollars on the stuff and put them into drawers whatever and one bin holds one pen you need Do you need that really so we that I would say it could be worth it but declutter first and see what you have and then shop your home first and shop natural products first got it okay so only worth it if you've already decluttered if you just start putting trash into it not worth it okay so as someone who is guilty of having the bag of bags I totally person how many bags if you are going to keep bags is the amount of bags that you should have in the bag of bags all right for someone who does groceries who gets groceries for family i have come out of a grocery store with eight bags so that's my that's what I keep in my trunk and by the way it doesn't sit in my house it stays in my trunk because we drive everywhere we live in a place so it doesn't take space in my house takes space in my trunk that said you can get to that number by seeing what's the biggest load that I need to carry out of Costco any given week make that your maximum and I promise you if you go into Costco and you're missing a bag like you will find a bag somewhere that it is not bags are not scarce yes okay everybody's giving out a bag okay next quick question is favorite way to organize shoes do you have a favorite type of organizer so what you can do to create a tiny bit more space maybe you can fit one more pair on a shelf is to do one with heel forward and one with toe forward oh and that will take up a tiny bit less space and it can make all the difference to making your closet carry a few more pairs which every pair counts so try that i love that okay next question is how much makeup is too much makeup there's never too much makeup no I'm not a makeup person so I say that but I say that in reality it's you know what your morning routine looks like too much makeup is when you've set a limit and it goes beyond that and you can choose though what that limit is if every drawer in your bathroom and every cabinet in your bathroom is your makeup and your husband's stuff sorry babe it's got to live in the guest bathroom can't live here all of this is my makeup space you're making that choice that that's the amount of makeup I'm going to keep maximum we fill our space based on the amount of space that we have that's true that's true and then last question are any tips for the pantry on best storing your snacks as someone who snacks a lot a lot of people like the to decant into clear containers so they see how much they have if that makes sense for you that's fine the only thing to remember is that takes maintenance so you do it once you've got to continue doing it every time you go to the grocery store or every time you get low on that snack so is it worth it to you to decant that's the first question if not you can have those snacks in a you put all the boxes and bags of snacks into a beautiful basket so visually you're not seeing the jumbled mess everything is contained and in order but you don't have to decant every single package of everything we have sometimes my kids will have one type of Oreos sometimes they want three types of Oreos if I had a different a separate container for each type of Oreo like we we would have 50 containers for every type of snack that we have in our house because we don't buy the exact same thing every week that's right so and so the amount of time that you want to spend maintaining is going to to determine how much of that decanting you want to do but an easy way to to make your pantry look nice is to contain stuff into uniform containers whether those are baskets or bags or sorry baskets or boxes that you can put all your containers into so that they stay in order it's visually clean but you don't have to decant every single little thing i love it so that's a tip yay good job see it wasn't too bad right? It was good.

Just so you’re aware, Bernadette paid off $72000 in student loans in just a couple of years, and she is now retired at the grand ole age of 40! In fact, she and her husband retired a couple of years ago, so under 40. But they’re obviously not idle. They’re on to their next endeavor, and Bernadette is just an inspiration.

I’ve put a link to her book, CRUSH Your Money Goals in the shownotes. It’s an easy read, and I’ve given a copy to both my college-aged kids. It's a great starter, a great primer for kids. Please, please share this episode with a friend, ok?

Have a beautifully organized week. I’m Zee, and I’ll see you on the next episode.