Adults having to have adult conversations. Oh no

I'm not stuck with anything, I put all my boomer parents shit in the trash

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.

First world problems

A trip to the thrift store can help. Its full of fine silverware and crystal and all sorts of nice boomer things. They will see that their treasures are worthless and can be painlessly donated or disposed of.

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.

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.

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.

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"

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.

archived

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 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

Wow, can you imagine having that?

A house that you could put "stuff" into?

Oof.

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.

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.

Man take the silver, you can scrap that

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.