Monthly challenge: Give Away Your Clutter

Each month this year, I plan to give myself some sort of challenge, to try to improve how I'm doing in that particular area.  So far this year, here's how I've challenged myself:

• I did the Clean Out the Cupboards Challenge to use up the excess food in my pantry and spend as little as possible at the stores
• I challenged myself with the Drugstore Bootstrap Challenge to build up my Extra Care Bucks from CVS and my Register Rewards from Walgreens.  
• I tried to Give Back...One Coupon at a Time 
• I used up all the mangoes from my tree during the Mango Months.
• I did the You Link, I Comment Challenge, where I tried to check all the links from my three weekly linkups.

For November and December, I plan to do another giving back challenge, but this one will help me as much as it will help the recipients.

I'm planning to do the Give Away Your Clutter challenge.  In this challenge, I will collect as much clutter in my house that we're no longer using but might be useful to others.  I'll then donate these items to charities. 

This will help the charities, of course, but it will also help me because I can take these donated items off my taxes.  I will be itemizing my taxes for tax year 2011; due to having a low amount of deductions, I alternate years of itemizing with years of taking the standard deduction.  See this post for my tax strategy.

Tomorrow, for my weekly frugal tip post, I'll post about how I get the maximum amount of deductions for my donations.

So I'm off to start decluttering!  Would you like to join me in my new monthly challenge?  Leave a comment below!