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.
The universal accumulation of stuff in western (& western influenced) societies:
- landfills & shit pools instead of remediation & recycling
- oil & plastics as a life blood (subsidized by governments)
- consumerism over creation
- marketing: “corporations will produce better things for us and solutions to our problems” hogwash
I’m given hope, hearing recent art show in California is entirely made from trash.
That said, our inheritance is banks of shit & “trash”, oil & plastics centric toxic energy-hole, and a society that subscribes to corporate dependence.
Wake! Create! Remediate!
I feel like I just read a Dr. Bronner’s soap bottle label.
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.
Estate companies will take the “good stuff” to auction, and house sale the rest for a few weekends. After that, there are businesses whose sole thing is buying up the remnants for their resale/thrift store. Think Big Lots but for dead people’s stuff.
Personally I hope my stuff gets handled like this. I’d rather someone, who wants the object, gets it for cheap, rather than it be a burden to my kids.
It’s how I got it all anyways. At leas the tools.
I really hope there’s a store called “Dead People’s Stuff.”
I drove past this place the other week. It’s almost what you want. Shop called ‘Vintage 2 Die 4’ with the moto of “We have the best deaf people stuff”
“Big Plots”
🏅
I have hoarder grandparents… I sometimes wish for a house to go up in flames while they’re not home just so nobody has to deal with going into it.
My parents went through this when their parents died in the early 2000s. This is an old people vs young people thing. Let’s see what millennials accumulate as they go senile.
Let’s see what millennials accumulate as they go senile
Probably not as much, what with not having anywhere to keep it
I’m leaving a bunch of tools and crafting supplies. I hope I jumpstart a career or hobby when I die or it gets tossed whatever I will be dead.
We will own temporary licenses to things, and we will be happy.
That’s a good point. My wife has an extensive audio CD collection. There’s something to be said for “owning” that music. But if she does, I will be keeping that collection on some other long-lived media instead that consumes less physical space.
All my stuff can just burn with the rest of the planet, I don’t have kids.
Mine is all on my server, photos and videos of me and my kid. Movies and TV shows I ripped from when blockbuster went under.
There’s going to be so many Funkopops.
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.
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.
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.
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What’s the melt value of Elvis commemorative plates?
That might be true if it were pure silver, but it isn’t.
At best, it could be sterling silver. If it was made in the past century or so, it’s likely just silver plated.
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.
Salvation Army and Goodwill don’t refuse things— I’m not sure where you’re getting that. They take their free donations, mark them up so much you could almost buy things mew elsewhere for the same price. They’re not a resale shop like Buffalo Exchange
The trick is to pack up a big box full of stuff and give it to them all at once so they don’t have time to look through it and refuse it.
They absolutely will refuse things they know they’ll have a hard time selling, and trust me they have unique insight into what people want and don’t love the idea of warehousing unsalable merchandise. Many Goodwill location’s FAQs acknowledge that they refuse to take certain things. Salvo has a whole page dedicated to why they refuse certain things.
Do they not have drop off bins where you are?
They do! They’re where I leave all of my used motor oil, dead batteries, and bedbug-ridden mattresses.
Come on. Just because you can subvert their policies by dropping stuff there indiscriminately doesn’t mean you should. Most of them say, right on the bin, that they’re for donations of clothing and shoes only.
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.
That’s exactly what’s happening. Parents live longer, and by the time they die, all their wealth is skimmed off by aged care providers, health care providers and various scammers.
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 father’s mother died a few years back and due to a rabbit hole I won’t get into, was left with cleaning out her condo by himself. She wasn’t a hoarder or anything, but he was floored by the work involved.
During the pandemic hermitude, he absolutely purged his own house of everything like this. He didn’t want us to be burdened with it when his time came. It’s ironic that I was a little upset over some of the things he threw out xD
My mom made them sell their house because “it’s the only way I could think of to get the basement cleaned out before we die”. She didn’t want to burden us but it really just changed the time line.
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.
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.
Estate sale my boy. You will actually come out ahead… it’s whoever buys responsibility to throw the garbage away.
I am thinking of doing an estate sale on myself. :-/
When we bought our current house, the previous owners had the basement walls covered with framed pictures of various things (I don’t remember what all they were - likely family and friends, that sort of thing). When we stopped by for the inspection or something, I noticed the trash was out, and one can that was open on the top was filled with those pictures.
That moment really reinforced the point that all the crappy knick-knacks we have laying around will likely also end up in the trash someday. We’ve definitely reduced our purchases of stuff like that and try to stick to stuff we’ll actually use.
My folks have been spinning off their treasures for a couple decades now. They waited until their kids had already established & furnished their own households, so a lot of it ended up in the category of “Yes, I can put this in the trash for you.”
Lifespans are at the awkward stage where the kids are too old and the grandkids too young to want any of those household staples.
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.
Ahahahaha thank you.
To who? Aquaman?
Don’t let the scammers trick you unto paying your parents debt. Debt cannot transfer to you.
Answer is sell the shit.
Sell it to who? Nobody else wants the shit either, that’s the problem
You actually don’t have to polish silver. It’s anti-bacterial properties still work if it’s tarnished.
But it looks shitty, it’s not nice to eat with black spoons and forks that never look clean.
Goblincore…
Fantastic! We can rebuild Florida!
