What would you do?

My mom has 115 pairs of shoes (that I’ve found). A woman’s dream, right? Except that they are about 75% of them are the same style (loafers with a small heel) and that 98% of them are brown/black/navy blue. She has about 5 pairs of light colored shoes.

I’m pretty sure my mom has a shopping problem. She goes at least once a week. I tried to breach the subject with to her, but she kind of waved me away as being a belligerent child. Of course, is not just shoes. It’s kitchen ware, home decor, housewares, and clothes. She has to have over 500 shirts, 500 pants, and hundreds of  random other in-betweens in every room of the house. At one point we had 3 Christmas trees even though we haven’t put up a Christmas tree for years.

I don’t know how to help her. I thought this article was interesting, however, she doesn’t go into debt with her spending at all so I doubt I could convince her that it’s a problem. She utilizes only a very, very small fraction of anything she buys, but she buys everything at an inexpensive price that she thinks she doesn’t consider it a loss.  I’m going back to school in two days and can’t really monitor it.

She’s been like this for years, but I’ve gotten used to it because I’ve grown up with her like this. But she’s getting the cabinets & counters in the kitchen redone and when I had to help her clear it out, I realized how bad it was. She was very reluctant to give away her surplus cottage cheese tupperware and or anything else even though she had a small store’s worth of kitchen goods. When we combed through her shoes (because of  my insistence) she only parted, very sorrowfully, with about 7 pairs.

What would you do?

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