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.”
…
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.
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.
I really hope there’s a store called “Dead People’s Stuff.”
“Big Plots”
🏅
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”
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 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.
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.
There are multiple whole entire industries dedicated to fleecing such individuals. Health care in the USA for one… Donald Trump’s campaign to name another…
Estate sales and auctions are where this stuff goes.
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.
The reality is that we live in a world that is overinundated with stuff, and the value of things that people hold dear and that they paid a lot of money for and they think retained value is not so much, which is unfortunate,"
Woof those are both true
My mom keeps investing in diamond jewelry. I’ve tried explaining to her that diamonds do not hold their value, but she won’t hear it.
My girlfriend’s wedding ring from her previous marriage with a 8900 appraisal would have fetched a mere 1200 dollars at the jewelry exchange. Her pile of old gold was worth way more.
I have a TV armoire from the late 90s that I thought I was finally going to get rid of. I had been using it to store brewing supplies but was downsizing. My son said he wanted it so it went to storage with most of his stuff. When I was moving all that stuff a year or two later, I wanted to hauled to the dump but wasn’t sure if he remembered. So now it’s at his place and doesn’t fit at all. So I think I’m going to cut it up and toss it.
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.
When my grandmother (Greatest Generation) died, it took my mom (Boomer), my wife, and I six weeks to go though everything and six days (over 2 weekends) to sell it at estate sales.
She had full house decor for winter, easter, spring, summer, autumn, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. She had a giant Rubbermade bin just of tiny porcelain shoes. I’ve never seen so many candles that had been burned once of twice then put away. At one point my wife screamed because she found an access door in a closet, leading to a smaller closet. and the tiny closed had half a dozen bins full of fake flowers. The house was always pristine and never looked cluttered - she spent decades pulling off one of the better magic tricks I’ve seen.
My mom majorly downsized a few years later, and just did so again. I think she saw her future and didn’t like.
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 mom is in the middle of downsizing. I have some storage space, so I let her keep her stuff in my house. It gives her an excuse to come visit and we go through her things while she decides what’s worth keeping or donating. I’m involved in the process, and I’ve saved a couple heirlooms with sentimental value.
My mother-in-law likes to show up unannounced and drop crap off. So far she’s given me two lawnmowers, a bunch of rusty garden tools, and a leaky water cooler. I think she thinks she’s helping, but it’s getting to the point that I feel like I’m her dumping site.
Put it on marketplace and get some money for it.
Wow, can you imagine having that?
A house that you could put “stuff” into?
Oof.
Seriously, my life has always been downsized.
Going home to parents feels like stepping into a fucking hoarders den, comparatively.
They lived in a different time period. Climate change hadn’t already happened yet, and the USA especially was sitting on top of the world, as the rest of it had been if not quite decimated then at least heavily damaged by all the bombing from WWII. And we were a socialist nation! Schools, roads, bridges, a fully functioning post office, and so much more. The top marginal tax rate was ~90% and… well anyway.
So yeah, like the Kings of Old, they accumulated “stuff”. It made sense to them at the time. Surely nothing would ever like… “change” or anything like that, would it? And they even okayed the dismantling of things like social security, and maintenance of infrastructure - so long as such did not directly impact themselves, it’s all good, right? So long as women also lose bodily autonomy, anything that went along with that is A-okay, r-r-right?!
On the bright side, do younger people have less stress, knowing that they don’t have to save up for retirement, bc they’ll surely die sooner than it would be able to keep up with anyway? Especially with inflation like we’ve seen lately?
Anyway that was quite a tangent wasn’t it? TLDR: people’s lives are so very different now, and look to remain that way permanently. And not just in the USA, but due to Brexit, in the UK too. Disinformation campaigns are strikingly effective.
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!
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.
Answer is sell the shit.
Sell it to who? Nobody else wants the shit either, that’s the problem
Ahahahaha thank you.
To who? Aquaman?
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.
Personally, I think we should bring back the custom of grave goods. If there’s some precious heirloom that holds sentimental significance to a person but isn’t otherwise valuable or useful, why not bury it with them?
I’m already thinking about getting some land and making an “indefinite time capsule” for storing a bunch of stuff that I have no use for but that I wouldn’t want to see go off to a landfill for sentimental reasons.
I love that your last paragraph explains that you want to avoid things going into a landfill by reinventing a landfill.
Yes, but it’s a curated and cataloged landfill.
There’s rather a big difference between a time capsule and a landfill.
The difference being a landfill might one day be mined for raw materials, whereas no one past your grandchildren will know about your time capsule until archaeologists discover it and misattribute all your sentimental crap as religious or sexual paraphernalia.
You’ve made a heck of a lot of assumptions about how a time capsule like this would be set up. But even so, how is being mined for raw materials better than having some of my stuff be misattributed?
No. We do not do nuance here
Friends… relations… Whatever the hell Meatwad is… I’ve lived a full life. It’s actually been pretty bitchin’. But now, regrettably, my life has been taken. Please bury me with all my stuff, because you know it’s mine…
Was that the one where he kills himself so he can haunt Meatwad?
ed: Oh yeah, s3e1 “Video Ouija”.
“Dearest Meatwad, turn on that dumb game cause I’m gonna whale on you from beyond the grave!”
I of course remembered Billy Witchdoctor but for some reason I didn’t think it was from the same ep.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_Teen_Hunger_Force_season_3?useskin=vector
Seeding the land for the next generation of American pickers?
Every time I pass a cemetery, I think, there’s a million bucks in jewelry just sitting there.
We’d need to take some cues from how the ancients did it. Either arrange for long term security, like the Egyptians, or rely on secrecy, like the Mongols. It won’t work forever, but as long as it works for a couple of generations I’d be satisfied.
One idea that comes to mind for modern grave goods would be to bury them in a nuclear waste disposal facility.
I don’t think we want to give an incentive to plunder nuclear waste.
“This necklace is beautiful, but why does the air taste like metal?”
Bring back kurgans and put parks on them.
At my grandmother’s funeral, she wore her jewelry for the viewing but it was quietly removed by the funeral home folks and handed to my mother before the burial. So there might be less jewelry than you’d expect.
Your mother is a grave robber. Smart woman.
I’m thinking more along the lines of future archaeologists. We learn so much about ancient cultures from what they bury with their dead, I figure we should return the favor.
Geez they had a lot of absolute tat!
“Why the fuck was this man burried in a refrigerator and why the fuck was it set on fire?” I want these to be the exact words for when my inevitable redneck viking funeral is done.
Bury me with my sweet vice I scored for free that one day.
So… a storage unit?
No.
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.
There’s going to be so many Funkopops.
Let’s see what millennials accumulate as they go senile
Probably not as much, what with not having anywhere to keep it
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.
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.
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.
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.
Those silver platters are plated
What’s the melt value of Elvis commemorative plates?
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.
