Millennials are about to be crushed by all the junk their parents accumulated.
Every time Dale Sperling’s mother pops by for her weekly visit, she brings with her a possession she wants to pass on. To Sperling, the drop-offs make it feel as if her mom is “dumping her house into my house.” The most recent offload attempt was a collection of silver platters, which Sperling declined.
“Who has time to use silver? You have to actually polish it,” she told me. “I’m like, ‘Mom, I would really love to take it, but what am I going to do with it?’ So she’s dejected. She puts it back in her car.”
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Sperling’s conundrum is familiar to many people with parents facing down their golden years: After they’ve acquired things for decades, eventually, those things have to go. As the saying goes, you can’t take it with you. Many millennials, Gen Xers, and Gen Zers are now facing the question of what to do with their parents’ and grandparents’ possessions as their loved ones downsize or die. Some boomers are even still managing the process with their parents. The process can be arduous, overwhelming, and painful. It’s tough to look your mom in the eye and tell her that you don’t want her prized wedding china or that giant brown hutch she keeps it in. For that matter, nobody else wants it, either.
Much has been made of the impending “great wealth transfer” as baby boomers and the Silent Generation pass on a combined $84.4 trillion in wealth to younger generations. Getting less attention is the “great stuff transfer,” where everybody has to decipher what to do with the older generations’ things.
There is a whole industry to transport Silent Gen and Boomer treasures to the landfill. Most commonly, a waste management company is going to park a construction dumpster in your driveway the same week you die. And there are hands for hire if your children can’t be bothered to go through your crap themselves.
There are also auction and estate companies that will try to get value out of furniture. That’s dying out though because IKEA doesn’t make furniture suitable for inheritance.
What the article doesn’t say is the stuff is all there is - there’s no money. Just stuff.
So if you throw it out, your inheiritance is nothing, otherwise you have to be come an online seller which - if you’re not already you know why you’re not already.
Estate sales and auctions are where this stuff goes.
Anecdotal but so far the only “great wealth transfer” I’ve seen has been to elder care organizations, not descendants.
For the low price of 6 grand a month, surprisingly well calculated to drain off their IRA’s, force them to sell their property, and close out their other retirement accounts just in time for them to meet overall life expectancy.
6 grand a month? That would be incredibly well priced. A room in a nursing home around here starts at 10k/month. If you want your own room or other amenities, it goes much higher.
My mom has kept everything from my childhood I mean everything. For a few years she was trying to pass some of it off to me and I kept having to turn down a lot of stuff, it made her feel bad. One day I finally managed to have a proper conversation about it with her. I don’t remember most of my childhood and things like second grade report cards don’t have any context because of it. Those are her memories of me not my memories of me. She finally understood after that and now she keeps what she can and doesn’t feel bad about “robbing” me of anything when she does get rid of stuff. Some heirlooms I’ve been asked about and many of those I accept, or in the case of one larger one I’ve accepted it “if I ever live somewhere that can fit it”
My mom held on to just about everything, but for rid of all my early 90s GI Joe’s and my stack of big box computer games.
My poor poor Sierra collection fine to the charity shop once I moved out.
I’ve managed to hold on to my computer games and even acquired my dad’s collection. GI Joes all went to my niblings though because I didn’t have as much sentimental value for them, same with my Legos and bionicles save for a handful. My pokemon collection recently resurfaced though and my mom handed those off I was pretty excited about that
We have the same mom.
Man take the silver, you can scrap that
I was thinking the exact same thing, maybe it makes a cold bastard, but they clearly didn’t use it…so I will… at a smelter!
My grandmother recently died. Her son and his awful wife couldn’t wait to swoop in and take all her stuff. I actually didn’t mind though. They took all the tvs and old fur coats. Me and my brother got the pictures they left on the walls and the silly fridge magnets she liked. I think we ended up with the better stack of stuff at the end of the day.
Yeah, you can get tvs and old fur coats from the store, but not family photos. Silly fridge magnets can also be hard to find.
Silver has an inherent melt value though, $30 an ounce.
So say you inherit a silver set weighing 110 troy ounces.
https://www.silverqueen.com/item/250501?Mcat=e7c15b48-b610-4c99-831d-937f77ccc4c9
Just the silver, BY ITSELF, is worth $3,300.
I’m Gen-X and oh my god you have no idea.
My dad was pre-Boomer (born in 1931), but he just endlessly collected stuff. Thousands of movie soundtracks and classical music albums on both LP and CD. Hundreds of DVDs. Mountains of movie memorabilia and posters. Coins. Stamps. Rare books. Antiques. That’s just the major collections. Lots of minor ones- sheet music, British cigarette trading cards, and then there are not just the over 20 books he wrote, but extra copies of them. Most of them are academic texts on film. The rest is stuff like terrible poetry and bad plays that no one is interested in but I can’t bring myself to get rid of.
Much of it had value, so I didn’t want to just dump it. We did an auction for some of it, garage sales, a flea market stall, I ended up spending about two years selling stuff on eBay, I gave a lot to friends, the CDs eventually just had to go to Goodwill because no one wanted them.
And I’m still stuck with a ton of stuff. A garage full of stuff that I don’t want to just toss because someday someone might want an almost life-size ceramic bust of Charlie Chaplin and it feels stupid to just throw it away.
Meanwhile, my also pre-boomer mom (born 1942) has been collecting antique furniture.
I think I’m just going to do an estate sale when she dies.
I have one “collection.” 5 bakelite radios and one Weltron Space Ball radio/8-track player. My daughter has my permission to take them to some charity place if she doesn’t want them. Preferably not Goodwill or the Salvation Army, but those are the choices you get in this town unfortunately. Nothing else I have is of any real value and I’m fine with that. And having seen what I’ve already gone through to get rid of all of this stuff, my daughter is too.
Edit: I forgot to say that the stuff I talked about doesn’t include all the stuff I said to my brother “just take what you want” about because I really didn’t want to argue about it and he was going to fuck off back to Atlanta after the funeral anyway. But he doesn’t have any kids and he’s 11 years older than me, so I’ll probably get all that shit too one day.
GenX here and, yeah, I’m guilty too…
At least (I would think) you could sell all of those as one collection.
This is awesome
My wife’s uncle has a huge comic book collection, and he’s getting up in years (never married; still lives in the house he grew up in). He mentioned getting it appraised, because I guess he does have some that may have some value.
Personally I’m just glad he’s thinking about this kind of stuff.
New price guides come out every year, I keep asking Overstreet for a digital edition and API access. :)
I’m at a point now where I can’t update the prices before a new edition comes out.
Happy I have sane parents who consistently downsize and donate without bothering me. We had one conversation where they asked me what I’m interested in. Of course I told them to enjoy their things as they wish.
There was a painting of a beautiful waterfall landscape, painted in 1890, (verified) my grandmother and grandfather bought early in their marriage. I always admired it and it made me think of nostalgic, fond memories of growing up. My dad hated it because that was the formal room he had to sit in for time out. Yoink. It sits in my living room and inspires me every day. A happy trade based on adult conversation.
Context is everything.
Same here. My mom is into the “KonMari” method and it’s a godsend.
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My dad just passed and I got a box of ninja swords and a telescope. He didn’t even have any pictures. I wish I had stuff to remember him by but he was destitute the end of his life.
Im sorry for your loss. But I am also incredibly curious about the box of ninja swords. Were these mall ninja swords or legit swords from Japan?
Mall ninja swords mostly. Some bokkens and knives too.
There are fencing leagues that use real swords you could try to find.
There’s a HEMA gym by me. I’ve thought about it before but I don’t know if I would stick with it and it seems like a steep buy in.
If that were me, I’d use the telescope to remember him. We’re all made of the stuff of stars. Everything inside of you is due to supernovas. Every time you look at the stars, you’re looking at what made us all, including your dad.
Yeah it is. We used to use it when I was a kid. I gotta clean it though. Thick cigarette dust coats everything he left me.
This is the truth. Both sets of parents have dumped stuff on us often enough that we’ve had to put our collective foot down and refuse most items. Gone are the days were there might be just a few real nice items people wanted to keep, now it’s collections of Precious Moments figurines or similar that nobody wants.
It’s really hard to get rid of stuff that is still good and useful. You can barely literally give it away. I hate waste, so just dumping whatever it is in the trash is an absolute last resort. Places you would think that would take stuff are also overwhelmed and won’t take a ton of different things. Salvation Army, Goodwill…all of them have gotten picky and will refuse things even if new on occasion.
It’s really given me a deep revulsion for “stuff”. If something comes into our house it has to have a real purpose, or if it’s replacing something, the old thing must go ASAP.
First world problems
Most boomers aren’t leaving shit to us but debt and worse economy ever. What fuck is this article. Answer is sell the shit.
To who? Aquaman?
Don’t let the scammers trick you unto paying your parents debt. Debt cannot transfer to you.
Part of this seems like it’s attributable to changes in lifestyle and material conditions of younger people, relative to their parents. Different aesthetics might mean their parents’ stuff looks incredibly gaudy to them, and doesn’t go with anything else in their apartment. My parents’ home is larger than any place I can reasonably expect to be able to afford, so I also don’t want their big dining room table that I’d have to pay for storage on for years before I can afford a space that it will immediately fill all of. Even if it’s a nice piece of furniture, that’s just a pain in the neck to go through, all for something I might never get to use.
On the topic of collections, boomers just fundamentally ignore key parts of collectibility. First, old collectables only became so valuable precisely because people weren’t obsessively hording and caring for everything with the intent of selling it down the line. Old Superman comics are rare and valuable due to people who bought them at the time they first came out largely treating them as disposable. They didn’t assume they were anything special that merited being held on to and cared for, so they didn’t. When everyone and their dog buys up commemorative plate sets, or Beanie Babies, or whatever other collectable grift boomers fell for, and they take great care of them, they don’t generally see their value do anything but decrease. The supply doesn’t get significantly reduced, and everyone else can see that they didn’t pan out as the collectable investments they were billed as, so who would want them?
That said, even for collections of items of genuine worth, you mostly need to hope that whoever you’re looking to give it to is as into whatever hobby as you are. If I were planning on having kids, I think it would be pretty unreasonable to expect them to know what to do with my fountain pen collection, unless they were into them as well. Otherwise, it’s just a ton of fussy pens that seem to have a fair number of duplicates that are really only distinguished by knowledge I couldn’t expect them to take the time to go gathering. Then, it’s still a big pain to actually identify things, make sales listings and sell them off. Hell, I have the knowledge, and even I find it annoying to do so.
Maybe we could address this, in part, by normalizing expanding options a bit for inheritance. If my hypothetical kids aren’t going to know how to make heads or tails of my pen collection, but I’ve got a younger friend who is just as into the hobby as I am, it would be nice if I could just leave them that specific collection, without having to worry it’ll kick off some acrimonious squabbling. Failing that, have parents indicate who they trust to sell an item for a fair price if nobody wants it. You can take it and think about it, but if it’s just not for you, you’ve got a trusted source to sell it off for you, so you (hopefully) don’t have to go through an ordeal trying to find someone to sell it for you that will give you a fair shake.
“It’s not like you guys aren’t going to have stuff, because guess what? Amazon is at your house every day,”
Ouch. Right in the furniture.
We are not a sentimental age
We don’t want our parent’s china or their ticker-tape parades
We are not a sentimental age
We’re out getting high on fire escapes
We are hooking up with strangers we will never see again
We are not a sentimental age
We are not a sentimental age
…
We are not a sentimental age
On our shoulders is a boulder of a debt we cannot pay
We are not a sentimental age
Diagnosis says I tend to disengage
I’d rather have my privacy, I’d rather have my space
These are just the pills I have to take
We are not a sentimental age
