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.
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.
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!
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 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.
My father was an incorrigible hoarder, but my mother had been culling his shit for years ever since he got too sick to stop her. Now that he’s buried she’s culling the last of it all, which is still a lot. She is not a hoarder but we kids have no use for her stuff even tho it’s quality. Estate sale is what it’s gonna be.
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
“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.
About to be? My dad and mom are TV level hoarders. It’s going to take dumpsters to clean their houses. And very little to none of it is worth anything.
Estate sale my boy. You will actually come out ahead… it’s whoever buys responsibility to throw the garbage away.
Going through this with my MIL. My wife is hurt that she got cut out of the decision-making, but it has been somewhat of a blessing in disguise in that her older siblings are the ones having to handle disposal of the decades’ worth of knickknacks lining every wall in her house.
My auntie has done the opposite for fucking years : she’ll come visit her mum and leave with some knicknacks she’s had her eye on from a previous visit. My mum is absolutely fuming about it. She absolutely does not need anything, but just the principle of her sister being such a fucking vulture…
My grandmother came in for years and asked for handouts from stuff that was mine when I was younger. My mother kept giving her my old stuff. When I went to move out I went to look at the storage area and nothing that I really cared about was still there.
A few years ago my father mentioned all the toys I still had and that I should come and get them, I told him that They had already given away anything I cared about and all that was left was junk It just needed to go away. He got all defensive. But if you’re going to let somebody come in and take from a pool of goods they’re going to continually take the best things until there’s nothing useful left. I ended up with a small bucket of Legos and a couple of my favorite matchbook cars.
I’m not really sore about it, but at the same time him asking me to drive 7 hours and get the collection of broken items that were passed over No, either sell it in an eBay lot or throw it away.
What did your grandmother need with kids toys?
She ran this elaborate trade. She’d tell my mother she was giving them to my nephew or to some other relative, then I would check up with them and ask them how the toy was and they’d say what toy.
I don’t know whether they ended up in a thrift shop or some kind of trade-up rubber band for a car kind of thing.
She showed up this one time with her trunk absolutely full of just random garbage toys, Tell me to pick whatever I wanted for my birthday. I was around 16 I was like no no I’m good I’ll take a hug that’s all I need. You could see she was highly disappointed.
I was only marginally disappointed that none of my kids ended up with any of my toys but in the long run it’s not really that big of a deal. Those things all meant things to me, They likely never would have meant anything to my kids.
