Did my Marie Kondo money experiment work?

The life-changing magic of less bank accounts

Tax season is upon many, so I thought I’d share an update on how last year’s Marie Kondo-My-Money Experiment went. Was it a success? Or a failure? Something in between?

As a creative and neurodivergent person, numbers, admin, and organization don’t come naturally to me, yet, like us all, I must deal with money and math in my professional and personal life. Given my numerical shortcomings, I strive to keep the money side of my business easy, and I look for ways to speed up or simplify the accounting. In that vein, one of the things I tried this year was to “Marie Kondo My Finances,” but did it work? Did it spark joy? And more importantly, could it work for you?

Here is an update on this magical money-tidying experiment, which began over a year ago.

The Challenge

Before beginning the challenge, I’d added a new, very busy Airbnb to my roster of properties that I manage in addition to writing books, and this new layer of complexity to my financial life tanked my haphazard accounting ”system,” which is a term I use with generosity. So, feeling overwhelmed by my finances, bank accounts, bills, taxes, business, clients, employees, and personal subscriptions, I looked for new ways to organize my finances.

When I have a problem, I’ll first attempt to solve it myself. When I can’t, I turn to my community, and if no one has applicable advice, I look to the Internet. The community's advice was to simplify, and one friend even helped me go through confusing account fees and terms, but it wasn’t enough of a fix. Things were still too complicated for my little artistic brain. So, I googled for answers, but most of the popular financial organization methods involve envelopes/spreadsheets, tracking apps, or hiring a full-time CPA. They were practical tips, but I needed a theoretical strategy because I was already updating spreadsheets and using too many apps. Hiring a full-time CPA wasn’t cost-effective, and my situation was definitely beyond pretty-colored envelopes.

Around this time, Marie Kondo released a new book, Kurashi at Home, which is a lovely coffee table hardback with her familiar thoughts on tidying and her “KonMari,” method for bringing serenity to the home, plus pictures of her house, descriptions of her domestic spiritual rituals, and a few recipes for simple, elegant meals. The book got me thinking about how much I adored her first book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Reading it transformed how I organized my home (color-coded closet, hello!) and was all about finding serenity through logic, functionality, priorities, and pleasing aesthetics, exactly what I needed for my finances!

So, I decided to apply Marie Kondo’s methods to my money.

My copy of the Kurashi at Home book by Marie Kondo.

The Method

The basic steps to Marie Kondo’s tidying/organization method are:

1. Gather

2. Discard

3. Store

She also recommends a 6-step process:

1. Commit yourself to the process.

2. Visualize/imagine your ideal lifestyle.

3. Discard items that do not spark joy.

4. Tidy by category, not by location.

5. Follow the right order.

6. Ask yourself if items spark joy.

You can read about these steps in more detail here:

Did it Work?

I tried as best I could to apply each step of Kondo’s process to my finances, beginning with visualizing what I wanted: no stress, and total money mastery.

Then I gathered the links and names of every account into one spreadsheet and worked through each, as part of my discarding process before re-storing items/accounts/money in new digital containers/accounts/app/spreadsheet that would better fit my needs and be more efficient.

My goal was to discard accounts and expenses that didn’t “spark joy,” as well as even sources of income that were perhaps too small to be worth their stress.

I also wanted to set up a storage and tracking system that was easy to use and that would simplify my taxes come April.

Looking back now after over a year, to be honest, this experiment only partly worked, but that’s better than nothing.

There was over a 50% improvement for sure.

Another Win I Never Expected

One more benefit from this experiment, that I didn’t anticipate, was that last summer, feeling the same sense of overwhelm with my email inbox, I decided to “Marie Kondo My Emails.” This experiment proved even more successful than the finances! Wildly successful.

I’ll write about that email process in a future post.

The Deep Dive

The rest of this post gets into the specific details of what helped and what didn’t work.

I’ve also included a downloadable Google sheet and an Excel template if you want to compile all your accounts using my method.

If this appeals to you, please support this publication by becoming a paid subscriber, which also gives you access to all my writing, experiments, workshops, and downloadable materials, plus a copy of any book I release during your membership, all for less than one cocktail in a bar per month. (Better for your brain than the cocktail also.)