Taking responsibility

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I am 28 years old and I am going to be moving out of my aunt's house. However, when it comes to it, I often find that I sit in my own world and act like a younger teenager. My aunt has started getting on me about cleaning the rest of the house as well as hers. She often says things like, "In the last 6 and a half years...you haven't offered to clean." However, the problem stems from asking her if she wants any help. She often says, "That's okay, you clean your own area." Now it's vice versa and I feel confused.

So, now she is expecting me to clean the house and gets mad when I don't. However, I have also had the issue of sitting and getting into a routine that doesn't involve cleaning. In the past, I have had roommates who would get mad at me if I didn't pick up surroundings on my own.

What can I do to start making things like cleaning a regular basis? What I can do to notice when something needs to be done?

I would also like to talk about budgeting. This is my first place and I will be paying for utilities and I have bounced several checks before during the last time I lived on my own. I even have really bad credit. What ideas does anyone have as far as budgeting?

Well with me, I always expect my husband to put his shoes away, bring his dirty dishes to the sink, put his dirty clothes in the laundry basket. If he forgets, I just leave them and tell him to do it.


When I see things out of place, I know it needs to be picked up. When the dishwasher is full and I can't put anymore dishes in on the bottom rack, time to wash them. If the dishes are clean in there, I know it needs to be emptied out and put away and the dirty dishes go in the dishwasher. You can keep your things picked up and put away. Always put your shoes away with you take them off, put your dirty dishes in the sink always. Always put your clothes away after doing laundry. Always throw your dirty clothes in the laundry basket or laundry room. My family also had difficulty keeping things picked up. I mean how hard is it to keep things put away when you are done with it? That's what I used to say as a teen. I still think that. To me it's just laziness. I admit I'm lazy myself and then I go on a cleaning spree. I see stuff out of place, time to clean. But overall my apartment is clean most of the time.


With budgeting, I just don't spend any money and I would wait till all the bills are paid before buying anything. Can your aunt help you figure out a budget? My mom helped me with mine before I moved out. Thanks to my money onbsession, I had no problems with budgeting. I balanced my checkbook and always checked my bank account. I knew what bills I had and would pay them and put them in my transaction. I didn't spend lot of my money on fun and stuff I wanted. I was also frugal. Now I don't see the point in needing more stuff, I don't want to be crowded in my own apartment. My CD drawer is full and I have so many videogames and no more room for Nintendo DS games. I have enough DVDs, we ran out of room for them we had to make more room for them. So shopping for stuff we want is useless and we have enough books. No more room for them. I need to read some and get rid of them but I'm keeping some of them.

Now my husband and I don't even use our transactions, he never used his, I always used mine. We always check our bank account online so we don't see the point. We know what bills we paid.

Here is how I clean. I'm a housewife so it's what I do. I go through and pick up every morning and afternoon. That means laundry in the hampers, dishes in the sink, garbage in the garbage can, other things in the rooms they go in. I do a load of laundry or two a day, but if you have fewer people, just do a load when you have one full load. I wash the dishes when I have a sinkfull or a dishwasher full. Take out the trash when it's full. Also, make beds and put away the laundry. That's what you do every single day. Here is my weekly schedule too so I get everything else done.

Monday - vacume carpets, sweet and mop other floors
Tuesday - dust all furniture
Wednesday - clean windows and mirrors and glass over pictures and monitors and any other glass like that.
Thursday - scrub bathroom
Friday - wash and change bed linens
Saturday - clean out fridge and do any yard work
Sunday - sleep all day

I think it can be very difficult to arrive at a consensus with others about sharing out the chores, unless everybody involved has very similar ideas about what chores are important. I was living with a group who were running an ailing worker co-operative, and I was always the one who wanted to minimise the house-scrubbing activities and get on with the more urgent business of saving the co-op from economic ruin......rather reminds me of an episode of The Simpsons in which Marge wouldn't leave her blazing home until she'd wiped the dishes. I tried to make my reasoning known to the group but it just made them angry, so we ended up with a tense compromise that didn't please anybody.

I read a similar tale in a book about relationship problems, in which a woman complained that twice her normal effort was only half of what her partner felt was reasonable - he was unusually fastidious about tidying up (a strange quality in a man, but it does happen).

I've never had to budget because I've always had enough for the essentials....naturally if you're operating close to the breadline then you'll find it helpful to know when the bills are going to arrive and roughly how much they'll be, but the mathematics is pretty simple for that. Just hang onto your bills (or bank statements), and after a year you'll have a good set of baseline data - allow a few percent for inflation and you'll know roughly how much spare cash you'll have for spending on other things. As long as you're able to live well within your means there'll be no need to do even that, but I know a lot of people have to, through no fault of their own. I was just lucky enough to receive a relatively good education (which led to a job that pays roughly the modal salary) and my parents were pretty frugal, so I just pay the bills and there's always a bit left over for a few luxuries.

I've lived on my own before and it did not go so well. For starters, no one helped me learn how to budget so I just spent money to keep up with the Jones's and not considering what I needed to pay for. So, it got me into the habit of bounced checks and angry roommates, and one disappointed landord. I also didn't bank rec and I didn't write the amounts in the register.

Meanwhile, I didn't pick up on things that needed to be done around the rental house such as mowing the lawn, because I was in my own world. One of my roommates got ticked to the max at me and didn't know what was going on.

So, I need some other helpful hints to keep my own place clean since I'll be alone with time and will have to find ways to remind myself.

I know how it is to be in your own world, (most of us on WP do!) I think that PaganMom's advice is the best. I use the list and check off method for my medications and vitamins, or I will completely flake on taking them! I type up a grid on the computer, with days of the week and boxes with the names of the medications and vitamins filled in. I leave spaces to check off. And, I actually have to use the alarm on my cell phone to remind me to take my bedtime medications, or I will get involved with one of my special interests, and forget. I set the phone to both beep and vibrate, so that if I am wearing headphones, I will still hear the vibrating. I set the phone on a hard surface nearby, so that I can't ignore it.

I'm 21 and I moved out of my parents house about a year ago to live on my own and it's taken me this long to figure out a good cleaning routine (and I'm still working on it!). Personally, I don't mind a mess so much and a lot of this time has been spent testing my tolerance for messiness. Doing the dishes serves as a perfect example. There have been times when I know I need to do those dishes but the fact that there is such a pile will overwhelm me and I worry more and more and become more resistant to doing it as they pile up, get moldy etc. etc. I've tried doing the "don't go to bed with a dirty dish in the sink" thing, but that's too much for me and as soon as I had skipped one day I would feel guilty and end up in the same situation as before. So now I do them about two or three times a week depending on how much they pile up. I try to make sure i don't have a dirty dish in the sink to start the week off, so I usually do a big load on Sunday night. Same thing with laundry, picking things up/organizing, bathroom cleaning, vacuuming etc. etc.

I also have a list of things that need to be replaced (broken down by application: personal hygiene, cleaning supplies, cooking supplies, etc.) that I need and I'll go to the grocery store and target about once a week to get whatever needs replacing, and I try to stock up on things when I need to buy them so I don't have to ever run out and get more on a moments notice. Unfortunately the list itself is stuck on my other computer which is broken temporarily, otherwise I would post it up here. And speaking of the computer... I keep a budget in a text file and I've gotten good enough that it's mostly in my head, at least my fixed costs: rent, phone bill, car insurance, internet bill, electric bill, food.

I don't know if this will be a problem for you or not, but I had a hard time saying no to friends coming over a lot, as I'm around the age where a lot of my friends still live with their parents and want to get out of the house. But learn to say no graciously. Really important. It'll keep you sane.

Learning to budget your time is also a very important skill I'm still somewhat deficient in (this kind of fits in with what I was saying above). I can sit for hours and surf the internet and at the end of the day I will feel crappy for not getting anything done. So make yourself a schedule (you don't have to fill in all of your time, but at least try and make a to do list ahead of each day or in the morning of each day) and try to stick to it. I know if I don't stick to my schedule it's easy to get stuck swimming in circles caught up in my own energy not really doing much and then I'll get somewhat depressed wondering if my life will ever amount to anything (Ennui, I think is what it's called).

One thing that hasn't been mentioned on the budget side of things is direct debits.

When I had my own place I arranged it so that all of my bills debited my bank account by a set amount autmoatically within the first five days of the month. After that, I would go and buy food for the month and so on.

As for the housework, I think the key to getting it to work is knowing how you work. If you like routines, you could build it into your routine so that maybe 3 times a week you're checking the house to see what needs doing. If you need reminders, you could set up phone alerts. Or something.

I always built it into a habit--get home from work, change clothes, have a look at the house & clean the bits that need doing. It didn't work all the time, but it worked better than any of the alternatives i tried.