Posted on 07/26/2017 7:30:41 AM PDT by Jagermonster
BOSTON—Two hundred stuffed animals, two violins, and a 7-1/2 foot-tall Christmas tree: That was just a corner of the possessions Rosalie and Bill Kelleher accumulated over their 47-year marriage. And, they realized, it was about 199 stuffed animals more than their two grown children wanted.
Going from a four-bedroom house in New Bedford, Mass. – with an attic stuffed full of paper stacked four-feet tall – to a 1,300-square-foot apartment took six years of winnowing, sorting, shredding, and shlepping stuff to donation centers.
Among the possessions the Kellehers are keeping are three hutches – one that belonged to his mother, one that belonged to her mother, and one that they purchased together 35 years ago. One shelf is carefully lined with teacups Rosalie collected during her world travels. Another houses a delicate tea set from Japan, a gift her mother received on her wedding day.
“We really don’t need them,” she admits.
That refrain is becoming a common one as baby boomers begin to downsize and discover (as many generations before them have) that their children do not want their stuff. In fact, they recoil in something close to horror at the thought of trying to find room for the collections of Hummels; the Thomas Kinkade paintings; the complete sets of fine china and crystal, carefully preserved and brought out at holiday meals.
For their parents, to have a lifetime of carefully chosen treasures dismissed as garage-sale fodder can be downright painful.
“When [people] try to throw something away, they feel like they are losing ... personal history, losing a bit of themselves, losing a little of their identity, and they fear if they get rid of it they’ll never have that same experience again,” says Randy Frost, a psychology professor at Smith College . . . .
(Excerpt) Read more at csmonitor.com ...
Your children will sincerely appreciate your responsibility, I can guarantee that. It seems small, but a parents' passing is difficult enough without needing to deal with mounds of "stuff", 99% of which only has value to the deceased.
My M-I-L didn't learn from experience, I'm dreading needing to deal with the fallout when she passes on. She hoards too, just different things. School Furniture, for instance, you know, the old really uncomfortable wooden chairs? Who the heck wants that, especially if they're all broken???
/rant off, thanks for listening...
You can go to an estate scale every day of the week if you want to. And it’s a good way to buy furniture for a rental property or first apartment or something along those lines.
There really isn’t a great collectibles market for much of anything any longer. Every great collectibles bubble has come and burst at this point. And with Boomers starting to pass on, the markets are only going to be flooded with more stuff.
I don’t know if there is a fortune to be made here. My dad (70) has been in the process of downsizing things from my childhood home for a good five years now. It’s actually a hobby. Somehow, the house seems just as full as ever.
But I don’t know if people really truly want to do the “Let’s get rid of this stuff” before I die game.
I currently have three sets of inherited china. I stand to inherit at least 6 more in the next 20 years. I could open a five-star restaurant.
We’re actually using the china of one of my wife’s great aunts as our “every day” dishes. It made absolutely no sense to replace broken pieces of the dishes we got at Macy’s ten years ago when we could have a dinner party for 36 based on the stuff gathering dust in our attic.
**We’ll be lucky if we can pay someone to haul it away.**
My mom’s attic was full of *stuff* ....found a junk dealer who agreed to come in....he wanted to pick through it all, and I said no. NO! You have to take ALL of it. ALL.
He reluctantly agreed to the job.
I was on my knees, in the eaves, handing him boxes over my shoulder, as fast as I could. One of the boxes had my name on it ...so out of curiosity, opened it. Inside was another box, a candy box IIRC, and in it were rookey baseball cards: Mantle, Berra, Ford, Dimaggio, several duplicates, and more. They were pristine; they hadn’t seen the light of day since the 50s. Fun stuff.
If your family goes back that far and had any type of wealth, it can be a worthwhile enterprise. Nobody on either side of mine or my wife’s family arrived here until 1900 or so. And no one had anything of value until the late 50s at best.
I mean, I have boxes of old Life Magazines and Sports Illustrateds. It’s an entertaining way to kill a Sunday. But there’s nothing of great value there.
I will take wonderful care of your $200,000 worth of jewelry. Would you like a PO Box #?
I would think you should educate your children on what the valuable items are if they don’t know. Or maybe just sell it all and put the cash in a mutual fund.
The astronaut issues of Lufe might be worth something.
What I am hearing is that brown furniture is not selling.
Dark heavy Victorian-looking wood and Alpo brown upholstery probably doesn’t sell too well. Neither does cheap leather. My parents—bless them—haven’t replaced their furniture in at least 30 years. It’s neat and clean, terribly out of style. But why would they replace their furniture if it’s not broken? :0)
We bought very neutral taupe and brown highest quality full grain leather from Thomasville 17 years ago. The furniture is in as pristine condition as you can possibly imagine-—our investment in the most expensive leather has definitely paid off. We also picked very classic basic styles from the Hemingway Collection; it has a very timeless look to it. We change things up with accessories like lamps and throw pillows, that’s how we mostly keep the style of our home current.
My daughter gets the value of my jewelry, is looking forward to having all of it. She’s my only child.
I don’t trust her to hang onto the rest of my cherished valuables. She’s 29 years old going on 16—that kind of millennial. She’s out of the house on her own and has a decent job. But she would probably sell my most expensive House of Waterford crystal for nothing and buy cheap stilletto high heels and Michael Kors handbags. Mehhhhh......
She still h as a lot of maturing to go through, maybe someday she’s appreciate my valuables.
Go into any half-assed antiques shop in Houston. It will have a section dedicated to NASA collectibles.
Every boy between the ages of 8 and 18 from 1959 to 1973 hoarded anything to do with astronauts. And most of those kids missed the Baby Boomer mom era of throwing out the shoebox full of Mickey Mantle cards.
I should be fair. There is a market for “pristine” collectibles. My father in law has tons of 1950s baseball cards and comic books that he has kept sealed since his childhood. A lot of the stuff looks like it just came off the shelf of a 5 and Dime. If you were an OCD kid like him and kept everything in perfect condition, there might be some value there.
“but I do have 300+ AOL floppy discs and CD’s in the original wrappers. “
Why?
“The big file was stored on CD and given to brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews and grand kids.”
That has now become “the Cloud”. Eventually, you will be able to search all this stuff. I’m coming up with a database where you can upload pictures and search on the names for my wife’s family and my dad’s WW2 photos.
When my brother moved to California in the 80’s, he was astonished at how much furniture cost. He called me and said “Go to second-hand stores, buy all the furniture you can find and ship it here”. We’ll make a killing.
Too bad we didn’t have money then.
My MIL hid money in books. Who steals books?
At the time I maintained a rent-a-mail box. AOL sent out tons of their floppy disks and later CD’s, some in special promotional or holiday metal boxes.
The lady that ran the place got them on closed mail boxes. She gave them to me.
Somewhere, I hope there is a greater fool that will pay money for this historical collection
My wife is looking into the cloud for storage now.
At least I would hope they’d digitize the pictures before throwing them out.
By that point the history is usually already lost. Unless somebody made useful notes on the back once everybody involved in a photo is gone it’s no longer history, just some picture of people nobody knows doing something nobody remembers.
It’s funny because right before digital took over there was a big movement for people to write all that stuff on the back of the photo, the whos and wheres and whens. Then digital took over, and nobody knows you can tag all the image files and record all that, and probably nobody is going to look on your harddrive when you die anyway. We kind of went backwards on that one.
He was friggin crazy.
Finding a floppy disk is next to impossible and new machines don’t come with optical drives by default. I tossed all of mine except for the games.
“He wasted thousands of dollars repurchasing things because he could not find anything he ever needed again.”
My 22 year-old son.
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