Crowded house

We’re jam-packing our homes with more and more stuff, latest insurance figures reveal. By Rob Stock.

PROFESSIONAL declutterer Anne Barron gets to go into a lot of homes crammed to the rafters with stuff.

It’s given the Christchurch mess-tackler a good handle on the proportion of things Kiwi homeowners have wasted money on, that they simply wouldn’t miss if it vanished tomorrow.

‘‘Probably as a rough estimate, 20-30 per cent I would have thought,’’ Barron says.

While she’d paid to help people declutter their homes, she’s had personal experience of decluttering herself, albeit forced decluttering, as a result of the Canterbury earthquakes.

Her home was destroyed, and with it all her household contents.

Her new home – now under construction – is smaller. Her personal effects are more modest too.

‘‘We really, really like living in a smaller house, and being all friendly,’’ she says.

And she mildly regrets her lost Denby kitchenware, but really, eating off the much cheaper plain white set from Farmers hasn’t detracted from her quality of life.

But it seems that decluttering is the opposite of what most households are doing, and there are sobering indications New Zealanders may have spent the ‘‘globalisation dividend’’.

As stuff has got cheaper, thanks to production having shifted to low-cost countries with weak wages, labour laws and environmental protections, many households seem to have taken the money saved, and just bought more stuff.

Statistics New Zealand’s Household Economic Survey shows the cost of contents insurance increased by 58.4 per cent between 2013 and 2016.

That’s partly to do with insurers’ bottom lines after the Christchurch earthquakes, but something odd has been happening to the ‘‘average’’ volume of contents shown on insurers’ online calculators too.

These calculators are to help families work out what to insure their stuff for.

But in case people can’t be bothered to try to put an exact value on their stuff, they provide an ‘‘average’’ which can be used instead.

And each year the average rises. For example in 2003, AA Insurance had its ‘‘average’’ household contents at $55,940. In 2010, it was $67,800.

Now it’s $86,780 compared to the calculator ‘‘averages’’ of Kiwibank ($84,000) and ANZ ($76,000).

That might seem reasonable, only for household contents the inflation clock has been creeping up at a slower pace than the averages have been rising, and for some things, it has been running backwards.

The prices of furniture and furnishings, for example, were 2 per cent lower in the first quarter of 2017 than they were at the end of 2010.

Household textiles had risen by just 2.6 per cent. SUM Insured Pty Ltd’s research into the value of contents in homes has discovered what Kiwi homes are spending their cash on. Furniture: The biggest single household contents group. It accounts for 23.4 per cent of the value of contents in an average home. Clothing and footwear: Shoes and gladrags account for an amazing 18.7 per cent of

Household appliance prices were down by 6.9 per cent.

The price of ‘‘personal effects’’ was down by 8.5 per cent.

And clothing was 1.5 per cent cheaper. household contents by value. This is a major area of household overspending. Homeware, including linen, kitchenware and luggage: 10.3 per cent. The kitchen is where professional declutterers find the greatest proportion of redundant items. Curtains, blinds and carpets: 9.7 per cent. Audio/visual and computers: 8 per cent. Garden tools/equipment: 6.4 per cent. Appliances like washing machines, dishwashers, freezers, fridges, ovens, and microwaves: 5.8 per cent. Games, hobbies and toys: 5.5 per cent. Sports and outdoor gear: 3.3 per cent. Books: Just 2.7 per cent. Food and booze: 2.2 per cent. Jewellery: 2.2 per cent. Cosmetics, medicines and toiletries: 1.9 per cent.