You have to understand, we’re talking thousands of LPs and CDs and hundreds of DVDs

Oh yeah. You've got to weed out the good stuff from the bad. I took maybe 1-in-5 from my mom's far smaller collection of LPs.

On top of everything else, he eventually got a DVD duplicator and a CD duplicator and just got whatever he wanted from video stores and the library and copied them. We just threw those out.

The worst thing I ever did was buy my mom a printer. She would go through stacks of paper in a month, just printing out whatever she thought she wanted to remember on the internet and sticking it in filling cabinets. I refused to show her how to change out the toner at one point, and that's largely staunched the flow of dead trees.

By the way, stamp collections are barely worth it unless you have a super rare stamp.

Like all hobbies, you really need to find a community of other hobbyists before they're worth anything at all. Even a super-rare stamp has no value unless its got an actual buyer. And how many people even still care if you've got a Civil War double-stamped limited edition whateverthefuck anymore? Unless you're selling it straight to a museum, where are the buyers?

I do wonder whether I'll live to see people with these giant Magic: The Gathering card collections claiming value at six-figures plus when WotC has long since gone bust and nobody plays the game anymore.