Cleaning up after your parents is a gift you give to them: look at it like them paying it forward for all the times the cleaned up after you as a child.

Psychologically, mentally, and physically, parents can have difficulty tidying up their stuff. My friend’s parents came from very poor backgrounds and had a lot of trash. The father had a shed full of stuff that was useful to him - he knew what was in it and how to use it. When the father died, the stuff in the shed was mostly junk to be sorted into scrap metal or put in the skip. A very few useful tools, a bunch of valueless obsolete tools, and a little antique/collectable stuff. The mother’s stuff was useful or precious to her, mementoes and knick-knacks. Plus some hoarder mentality that made sense given her background. Mostly valueless stuff to anyone else. What value is a drawer of your smalls?

I want my parents to pass their problem down to me and my siblings. I think forcing parents to tidy up or downsize can be cruel. Why be selfish and needlessly make my parents sad?

It doesn't have to be this way.

Synopsis of "The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning" by Margareta Magnusson.

In Sweden there is a kind of decluttering called döstädning, dö meaning “death” and städning meaning “cleaning.” This surprising and invigorating process of clearing out unnecessary belongings can be undertaken at any age or life stage but should be done sooner than later, before others have to do it for you. In The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, artist Margareta Magnusson, with Scandinavian humor and wisdom, instructs readers to embrace minimalism. Her radical and joyous method for putting things in order helps families broach sensitive conversations, and makes the process uplifting rather than overwhelming.

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Gentle-Art-of-Swe...

When FiL passed away there were multiple buildings on their 50 acres full of stuff. Both he and MiL were only children. Everything over 200 yrs had flowed to them.

“Priceless heirlooms” weren’t of interest to anyone. Auctions led to junk dealers. There is a hopelessness in realizing that lifetimes of activity were of little value, that nobody even knew what many objects were.

I felt like the girl in the movie Labyrinth when they weigh her down w worldly possessions. There’s no way to train for it. It’s like the Kipple of Philip K Dick.

I thinking it was the Canadian sitcom "Kims Convenience" that had the excellent line from the father when he was cleaning out his basement with his son:

"We're putting things into two piles, one we're throwing away now and the other you throw away when your mother and I have died."

First thing I did was take a bunch of photos. One of the things that had meaning wasn't the individual items, but the assemblage of the whole: the choices made in the arrangement of tools in the workshop, projects being worked on, the "look and feel" of the house. After that I felt I could "disassemble" things without losing too much: in the process getting rid of cruft and keeping other stuff.

A big part of the job was "reverse engineering" the things the deceased knew but I didn't, and I could no longer ask about. That random key? Can it go out, or is it irreplaceable and belongs to something that matters?

In my mind the best thing a person can do to ease the clean up is leave current documentation. Little things like labeling keys and making sure documents have dates. The things in your head that others can't know.

I get this if one of your parents was a bad painter and filled the house with huge framed canvases. Otherwise, I'm just looking for stuff I want, and anything that I know was meant for posterity and few people would care about (my father updates a family tree, for example.) After that, call a professional and sell the lot to them i.e. the thing that these people mention not doing.

You may "lose" your parents if you don't have all of their stuff (I'm not sure what that means, but the article keeps saying it), but luckily, the odds are you won't have to live without them for more than another 20-30 years.

If that stuff outlived your parents, that means that it served its purpose well. Let somebody else buy it off ebay from an estate liquidator so it will create more happiness in the world, rather than hoarding it, which is the impulse I really suspect these situations are feeding.

I have brought up in hypotheticals to anyone who might be lumbered with them after my untimely passing the best ways to liquidate a lot of board games without getting pennies on the dollar. My only actual worry about my (physical) estate is that my heirs may get ripped off while dumping it.

Generational differences in tastes will take its toll on some of this more than other bits. I don't know anyone under the age of 40 who cares one bit about fine china and china cabinets. As more and more people who collected china die off, there's a bigger glut of it. Collections that took a lifetime and thousands of dollars to accumulate end up going for pennies at estate sales while the cabinets end up in a landfill. Pianos seem to be going the same way. Probably grandfather clocks too. There are some younger folks who are interested in these things but not enough to sop up the ever increasing supply coming in from estates.

My father's family lost everything in the Great Depression. His earliest memories were of moving out of the mansion into successively smaller houses. My mom is the daughter of refugees who often went hungry in their early years in the US. When I was growing up in the 80s, we lived in relatively wealth, but I thought we were poor. We had economizing rituals that are laughable in retrospect: we'd save everything including used tin cans, we would share a single teabag for making tea at breakfast, nothing ever got replaced if it could be fixed (Dad still keeps an 1980s-era microwave working, although over the years he's had to replace half the components on the main board).

My parents' house is now probably worth millions. They had careers and have savings and are living out a very comfortable retirement. There's a house full of stuff that I'll have to deal with one day. It will be hard, but I will try to look at it as a meditation on the challeneges they went through and how they coped.

I expect one of the hardest parts to be books. I was raised to think of books as practically sacred. Every inch of the house is stacked deep in books: art books, science books, old books, mass market books ... Libraries might want 1% of them, but they'd sell the others at fundraisers for a nickel or maybe just send them off to be pulped.

There's also my dad's old computer stuff. I think there's a PDP-11 rotting in the garage. When I was a kid, there was a big old analog computer out there. I suspect these will be re-homable.

Recently had this experience. It helped me to consider it this way:

An old stage theatre has finally closed, after nearly a century in operation. I had the task of emptying the prop room. Going through it, I found very recognizable things from shows I knew and loved. Also some things I maybe remembered, but not sure what script it supported. And lots of stuff, no idea why it was there or what show it was in.

Anyway, it's just props. The actors have done their lines, the shows long finished their runs, the audiences come and gone. The important part, the only part that really stays with us is the memory of the performances and how that changes us.

So sure, keep a prop or two if they are particularly commemerative. But don't worry about the rest. They can move on to another performance in another theatre elsewhere, or even the bonfire if that's their fate. Others should have them if they find them useful for their audiences.

Thinking about that helped frame it for me.

I feel like these days, stuff is incredibly cheap and therefore it's very easy to accumulate a huge amount of it. Sure, we have out sentimental items and useful tools we use everyday. But a huge amount goes un-used, sitting in boxes, closets, attics and garages waiting to be thrown away.

I try to "live small". My apartment is relatively small. I'm still wearing clothes from high-school. I still the knife, fork and spoon I bought when I moved out on my own. When something breaks I mend it, replace it or turn it into something new. I'm not a hardcore minimalist, far from it. But there is great joy in having enough.

After having to deal with all the stuff my parents left behind I swore to myself that I would not do the same thing to my kids.

It's easy to say "just throw it out" but so many items have nostalgia and memories attached. Yet if I hadn't had to sort through it all, I never would have missed that stuff.

I need to get on it. I'm not getting younger.

Where I live we have 'council clean-up' days. It's a designated day once per year you can leave a reasonable amount of rubbish outside your house including old furniture, tools, utensils etc etc. The good thing is it's widely advertised and if you sort your stuff out properly and lay it out in an organised manner, lots of amateur collectors will come and take it away to re-sell or re-use leaving only a small amount of true rubbish for the council to actually pick up (3 days later than the advertised day).

We went through this ten years ago with my wife's dad. He had a lot of stuff, but he had a lot of hobbies...there was relatively little "junk," and he used a lot of it until just a year or two before he passed. Some of it went to fellow hobbyists. Some went into storage. The stuff we just couldn't deal with were sold, along with the house, to a professional flipper who conducted an estate sale, hauled the rest away, and remodeled and sold the house.

My mom was smart, for the most part. My parents weren't really big into accumulating stuff, beyond what people without many hobbies accumulate over the years. Twenty years after my dad passed, my mom downsized before she sold the house and moved into and independent living community. We got professional help downsizing further when she moved from independent living to assisted living, and finally got rid of almost everything else when she went into memory care. As much as she'd gotten rid of, she still had an amazing amount of stuff. It was a little easier doing it in stages, I suppose.

I watched a friend have to deal with this. There’s just so much to sort through or get rid of.

My grandfather left dozens of model airplanes behind. No one in the family flies them. Most of the people he used to fly them with died before he did. Fortunately, my grandmother is still alive and we’ve found people who would appreciate the planes.

We could have just burned everything but we have emotional ties to these things.

My mother is very pragmatic about this. She took me and my brother aside and (to paraphrase) said "You don't need sentimental a attachment to these things. Keep a few bits if you want, get rid of everything else. But this, this and this are valuable and you should get them properly appraised and then use the money for something you need. The rest shift as you want."

As someone who's fairly minimal (and definitely doesn't like clutter) it was lovely to hear and has (somewhat!) relaxed me. I'm definitely the kind of person who would have felt guilty about shifting the things she has chosen to surround herself with otherwise.

My dad had a brief encounter with a coma and it really brought the mountain of his belongings to the forefront of my mind. Books, comics, baseball cards, knives, guns, and other collectibles. Where he stores all this is a giant building that looks like a barn.

After his coma I talked to him about my fears of dealing with this and the issues I had trying to reverse engineer his finances from QuickBooks. He was actually very receptive, and it was an opportunity for him to share his thoughts on life and death with me. Since then he's earmarked or given away a lot of things, and the building is much more organized.

If you find yourself in a situation like the article, don't wait until someone died to deal with those things. In my dad's coma, I observed my own mental state; everything I saw was a collection of memories of my dad, I couldn't fathom if he passed what to do with all of it (and my mother would need to move). I had no hierarchy that correlated things that remind me of him and things that were valuable to him. Those things were impossible to know without a conversation.

My dad was born at the beginning of the Great Depression. He told me once about being unable to buy thread, not because they didn't have the money, but because there was no thread to buy - all the thread factories had closed. You had to re-use thread.

Now imagine that that was all you had known for your entire life up to that point. And you had no idea that it would ever be different. That would shape you.

My dad was a hoarder, at least partly because of that. When he saw something that he could possibly use in some way, he kept it.

My dad died earlier this month. I'm getting to clean up the mess. It's not fun. I don't like it. I find it rather depressing that he spent so much effort collecting so much that has so little value. But I can understand why he did.

I love getting rid of stuff. I've just packed up my apartment again, and my wife and I have under 5m3 of stuff, and that includes a couple of larger pieces of furniture, 7-8 framed pieces of art, a decently-sized toolbox, and a big TV. Most of the time we're away from our homebase anyway, so living out of two suitcases. It really means that our treasured items are treasured, as most have undergone several iterations of this slimming process.

It's not for everyone, and I'm not trying to make some larger moral point, but for me it always feels so cathartic to strip down the stuff and just be left with items that you actually really like

I have silly items of zero value, that my partner would throw in a heartbeat. I have wires and gadgets rarely used. And books they are not I inerested in. If I dropped tomorrow, my cooking pans and teddy bear would be all that remained!

We had seven days to clear my Dad's which was our family home. Not even enough time to review trinkets and resurface memories. A few useful items went to charity. The rest the scrap heap. And I was limited as to what I could take. I took a multimeter and, a drill, and a barometer. Could have done with some furniture, plants and other stuff, but it was just too bulky to deal with.

My Mum sits on a pile of organised rubbish. And shortly after she shuffles off, the lot will go in the bin.

But then, my family and I have nothing of value. Which does at least save on any squabbling.

Both my parents have and had loads and loads of stuff. My Dad had about five car carcasses. Three sheds of wood. And other junk. It's pretty selfish leaving others to deal with your shit. I know that sounds cold, but it ruins people.

What will happen to the heaps of digital junk stored on flash drives, hard drives, forgotten online accounts? I get overwhelmed thinking about organizing my own electronics files… wonder what my kids will do with it all.

Cleaning out a parent's house is a singular ritual. For me it reminded me that most of the stuff I "value" my kids will not care about, I've worked on putting disposal suggestions into my trust documents so that not only can they efficiently get rid of the stuff, they will do so knowing that it is what I want them to do.

It is the last bit that was hard for me, wondering if my parents would be "okay" with me giving this stuff to a person who is clearly just interested in making a buck of reselling it rather than cherishing it as they did.

A friend of mine has a dad who is known in certain circles (name withheld) and I quote "Mr XYX, the owner of the largest collection of non-running Triumph coupes in the USA". He got a lot of sh*t for what is essentially a junk yard from his city. His house is filled to the brim with model train cars, in the bozes still, and all the EBay printouts of the auctions he won and lost. I do not know what my friend's plans are for all of this when his dad kicks it but I am betting on a lot of hassles around rusted hulks. Although they are strangely photogenic, we took some incredible photos...

Why is everyone acting like this is not already a solved problem? Heirs are not forced to spend hundreds of hours sifting through their parents stuff... If that is too much of a burden, just call up the nearest estate sale company. They will do it all for you.

I hail from a long line of hoarders - it so happens that the three previous generations all experienced war and associated loss of all possessions.

I know what to do with the mass-produced stuff like furniture, souvenirs and electronics, but I'm going to have a hard time parting with with things my parents made themselves.

Myself, I include the cost of space occupied by each item I'm considering buying. With the real estate prices being what they are it's a great way to limit the amount of new stuff pouring in.

I collect phonograph records, generally from thrift/charity shops. It is always an interesting glimpse into someone's life when an entire record collection (minus anything actually valuable of course) ends up there after a house cleanout. Sometimes a bit of the personality shines through, and if there is a name I can often get more context.

I recently discovered an acetate home recording from the 1940s that had a name on it. I discovered that the family still lived in the area and a little research let me reach out to one of the children to return it to them. They had no idea of the recording's existence, it just went out with all the other stuff.

It's probably a great premise for an extreme cold case murder mystery.

One says "junk transfer" another sees opportunities.

Jewelry likely can be smelted, stones reset in modern settings.

Tools can be refurbished and/or moved into 3rd world markets where things are often repaired.

Ok, trinkets and doilies really are junk, perhaps a handful for movie sets?

Hopefully some bright and hustle style entrepreneurs can find ways to upgrade this junk into the hands that rightfully could use them.

The part I'm particularly hopeful about is more homes coming on the market. Yes they may want for a renovation/updating but think of the multibedrom family homes that grandma is living in housing 1-2 ppl and soon could house a whole family? That's going to be helpful to those currently priced out of the market.

I feel with Millennials not being able to buy normal sized homes and the rise of minimalism with trends like Marie Kondo, this traditional junk transfer may end with Gen X.

I got it when i saw that dirty green Coleman flashlight. Who'd keep that? But ours was red, we used it at night on our farm and I vividly remember how that button felt and sounded when you clicked it on or off.

My grandparents and great grandparents are dead, so they don't have to live with the embarrassment of having their descendent reduced to being "the sort of person who buys his own furniture," but that's progress. I am keeping some of it, and we all do a purge every few years just in case, but I find it's the photographs that are the hardest to destroy. Something that meant so much to someone else. Like tears in rain, I suppose.

Is it just me or is that article written by, and this thread full of, assholes? Your parents are dead and you’re complaining about having to sort through their stuff and deal with their horrible taste in furniture? If you don’t want to deal with it have it all collected and sent to landfill and get on with your life. I’m genuinely surprised at how miserable and selfish sounding a lot (not all) of the people in this thread are.

I had to deal with my Dad’s possessions when he passed a few years ago. We still have quite a lot of it in our garage. He had a lot of technology that is long since obsolete. A lot of books and toys and things that were important to him. It’s had a profound effect on me and how much stuff I am willing to keep, understanding that it will be burdening someone else some day.

I'm fortunate that Mom and Dad have been considering this and have been actively thinning their possessions as they age.

For about the last 10 years, their "birthday presents" to us kids have been things from the house. (Us kids are old and don't need typical presents. The nostalgic stuff is better now, anyway.)

I've started doing this in my life: I take pictures of items that have emotional meaning to me, and then throw away the item.

I care about the meaning to me, what memories it gives me, not the physical item.

It's really really hard though. But my kids will just have a Google Photos album to keep rather than a house full of stuff.

For years I've been engaged in an enormous decluttering project in the house I grew up in. Aside from filling a few huge dumpsters, I went on countless trips to scrap yards to recycle metal stuff, to Best Buy for electronics recycling, to auto parts stores to get rid of old motor oil, to thrift stores to donate useful things, and to a hazardous materials disposal facility where I had to pay nearly $700 to responsibly dispose of fertilizers, antifreeze, old paint, and so on. I also spent entire days digitizing huge amounts of photos and documents. It has been a very time-consuming project. My piece of advice to help prevent this kind of situation is to keep a big "thrift store donation bin" beside your trash and recycling bins.

> And, even if they did want them, this Great Intergenerational Dump is happening just as millennials are facing a housing crisis, which will leave many of them either renting or living in much smaller homes. Grandma’s massive china cabinet is not going to fit.

Seems like a weird comment given the possessions were already in a property in the first place, and the death of the parents will normally result in one of the children inheriting it too. Unless the parents were renting, in which case I doubt they had much space or money to accumulate too much stuff (this will more likely be my generations problem, since homeownership is soo far out of reach for most of us).

The book "Inheriting Clutter: How to Calm the Chaos Your Parents Leave Behind" by Julie Hall is a fairly good guide to how to handle this situation. Would recommend reading it before you need it.

My mother in law was born and died in the same room of her house, which had been her mother’s (father went to war and was KIA; he’d been born in that house).

On of my sisters in law moved in while her mother was dying; she was moving out of her husband’s home (he’d grown up there; his father had too). When her mother died, SIL simply kept living there.

I’d sometimes go into the attic and find weird old stuff. It appeared that stuff was discarded when house was renovated or repaired, but otherwise simply accreted.

Getting acquainted with Swedish death cleaning is not a terrible idea. Less really is more.

https://youtu.be/yv6fBOZlMgE

This is also about a change from living in houses with some real estate to living in small boxes stacked on top of each other in a dense city.

Depending on your family history and where you live maybe this transition was done a generation before, or even longer, but for many who have parents and grand parents this is the shift from houses in more rural areas, or houses with a garden and some space to dense urban living.

People in small, stacked boxes do not like stuff because there is little space for stuff.

They are trained to rent everything. Box, music, movies, games, car, bike, scooter, sports equipment, tools, a space for parties, coffee, cooking, books, photo albums, Less common: furniture, clothing

Perhaps in a few decades what a new generation will leave behind is nothing.

Some will say that is great. People in small, stacked boxes more than others.

I think it is a tragedy.

There is real wealth that is transferred, but there is so much more. A mosaic of how your parents lived, their culture, what they learned, and what they treasured.

My father's rich record collection.

From a different time and place. A time capsule.

Books, some have been handed down in generations. Most now impossible to buy.

Tools of all sorts. Some have old and well used and still working and great to own if you have a house with some property.

All is stuff and stuff is junk now.

Your grandchildren will have no idea about how you lived and what you experienced. There will be no record collection, books, tools.

I do live in a small, stacked box myself and these things I find tragic.

Others will find freedom.

I'm not looking forward to dealing with my parents stuff, a major reason(other than their death) being that taste seems largely generational. They both seem to love giant wooden cabinets...for everything. They both have monstrosities of a TV stand/console/shelf, etc. It's actually nice quality, but nobody I know my age or younger really likes stuff like that. I can't imagine I ever will.

One thing I don't see discussed is how increased longevity means that the inheritors are also older. This means that they have more and more of their own junk to deal with. Even the grandchildren are getting relatively old these days; it is different situation to receive stuff from grandparents when you are just getting your own home set up vs really already having everything you possibly could want

When my grandma died we found something similar. We were getting more and more aggressive with shoving stuff into garbage bags, when my mom and aunt opened the closet and found clothes of my deceased grandfather. He had died ten years before my birth. Most of it was falling apart, except for a tuxedo that fitted me nicely! A good catch for a day of clearing out this apartment.

Almost 400 comments, and noone seems to be getting to the crux of the issue:

This is about mortality, legacy, and humanity's fundamental inability to effectively deal with death.

The "junk" is memories. A lifetime of memories of people important to us - important to them - a record of their accomplishments. It was the best they could do. Not everyone gets a library wing, a mausoleum, or a wikipedia page. But for a brief moment maybe you have your stuff - and stuff triggers memories that your life actually happened and had meaning.

And then you're gone, and it all becomes a useless burden.

Yes, it's frustrating. But it's more existential than that. When you clean out your parents' junk, you have to confront with the reality that in some years someone else will be cleaning out yours. And the memories you're making of the rich and powerful experiences you had will also disappear into the aether.

That is disturbing and upsetting to most humans. I'm impressed so many commenters here can be completely detached from it.

Oh gods I can relate to this article. I am moving from Iceland to Tenerife in the next 2-3 years (just made up my mind last month) and I have a 163 sqm house full of "stuff" I need to reduce to 4 large suitcases in less than 24 months. I dread it but a bonus is that I won't leave a pile of garbage for my kids to clean up once I kick the bucket.

Hoarding is a revolting, serious antisocial behavior. If your loved ones do this, there are counselors and therapists that can address this, if the person(s) are ready to accept responsibility and change their behaviors.

It’s easy to dismiss it as quirky and harmless but it can get out of control if there’s a significant trauma or some other trigger.

I went to a storage shed once with my wife. Her father put a bunch of stuff in a shed including hers. The storage shed manager:

"Yep. Parents store a bunch of shit the kids don't want. The parents die off, then the kids empty it, then add a bunch of shit their kids don't want into it. The cycle continues. "

My father has been doing a decent job decluttering from things my mother accumulated. She is still alive, but not all there.

He has a safe that has multiple locks that I need to make sure I have the code(s) for.

I don’t accumulate stuff and already told my sister when it comes to that time, she can grab what she wants. The rest goes to donation/dump.

The chair I'm sitting in cost me $20 at an estate sale a few houses down from where my parents live, because the wife died and the husband wanted to move to florida.

I do not look forward to the day my parents die because we have a history of accumulating material possessions and there will be a lot of cleaning.

My grandmother died about 8 years ago. One of the things I took when helping clear out her house was a white plastic chopping board - it was probably pretty cheap to buy, but I just hadn't got one at the time. I still use it almost every day... and remember her.

My father in law dumped 6 giant totes of my wife's childhood belongings on us right before we moved into our new home. It was a 1000 mile move so basically we had to pay hundreds of dollars for a bunch of crap she didn't even remember having.

PBS has an interesting way of decluttering in the Legacy List series. The service asks for 5-10 mementos to (find and) keep. Everything else goes to resellers, charity, or garbage. They often choose large estates that have been in the family for a century.

George Carlin wasn't wrong when he said houses are just a place to put our stuff. Why are we all so attached to stuff?

I've found myself slowly letting go of material things, and with that comes a feeling of tranquility.

In my twenties I was cleaning out my apartment if some old stuff and my in laws who had a cat said they would take the boxes to the dump. Turns out they kept the stuff and I had to get rid of it again when my FIL died.

My parents lived on the same farm for 70 years, a mile from where my father's parents had lived since 1905. If you think a suburban home can fill up, just imagine a place with all kinds of outbuildings, and two adults who having grown up dirt poor in the depression, could see potential value in almost anything. But when my father became too incapacitated by age to maintain the place, they bought a new townhouse in the small prairie town 7 miles from the farm, selected the things that they needed and wanted to occupy that space, including a few things they thought they should pass on to their children. Then they sold everything else, including the homestead, at auction. Us kids were permitted to buy anything we wanted personally, of course, but at the auction. Costs for us could come from our eventual inheritance, if necessary (in the end, nothing that valuable went to any of us). A week preparing for the auction, and a morning, and it was all gone.

Now in my own retirement, I have been thinking a lot about what happens to our own homestead, and the tools and detritus of a lifetime that it contains. I've been diligently culling things that I know I won't be able to use in the next 20 years (which is probably the most I've got here), either through Craigslist or the like where an item is still of use to someone, or to by disassembling them and recycling the materials (where feasible), or hauling to the landfill (where recycling is not feasible) for those things that are no longer likely to be useful to anyone.

But that will still leave a lot of stuff. Multiple looms, spinning wheels and associated equipment and fiber material from my wife; innumerable tools and machines that I still use regularly in the orchard, woods, garden, and wood and metal shops; a library of thousands of volumes.

We have a neighbor 15 years older than us who, faced with this problem and no children who wanted their homestead, which they, like us, had built up from bare land over 40 years, found a much smaller place, moved what they wanted there, and sold the homestead, furnishing included. to a younger couple wanting to start a rural life. I like that idea ... make it someone else's problem, but also boon. My own kids will get and have enough that we can afford to sell at a discount if someone who really values the place and supporting materials comes along.

My mother died last year at 92. She was a very wise woman.

One of the 'gifts' she gave her children was to intentionally de-clutter several times. She'd offer us her possessions periodically and would refuse material gifts for holidays or birthdays. At the end, she lived in a small apartment with sparse furnishings.

She also managed her own funeral, making arrangements for all the necessary processes.

Her passing was very difficult, but much, much less than it could have been.

I hope to do the same for my children one day.

Realizing that someone has too much junk that you're going to inherit is easy. Convincing them to do something about it is hard.

I'm unfortunately going to have to face this scenario with my in-laws and I'm not looking forward to the arguments in the future about a whole storage building of junk that we're going to inherit soon. Rusted cars. Art from the eighties nobody wants. Furniture. Medical records. Lots of planned projects that will never be realized.

Fortunately, I like to collect digital things while being minimalistic with physical things. When I die, I'll just tell my children to bury my hard drives with me.

I think that emigrating killed any hoarding tendencies I may have had. I went to live in another country with two suitcases as my possessions, and left everything else behind. Although scary, I don't miss any of those things and it was one of the most liberating things I have ever done because it thought me that the objects we accumulate are not really that important.

>An exponential growth in storage lockers that are never emptied.

Based on a couple of relatively recent experiences, you probably shouldn't get a storage locker unless it's to bridge some specific short-term need. Otherwise, you're paying monthly rent, mostly kicking the can down the road, and potentially creating an unnecessary chore when someone--who may not even live locally--has to clean out the unit.

We moved across the country a few years ago after living in one place, raising kids, for more than two decades.

The experience of disposing of accumulated junk was very cathartic, and has led us to both reduce accumulation of more junk and look critically at what we still have. We're not close to death (I hope!) but we've left things in a much tidier state for the kids when we do go.

Jeez, At least y'all have someone giving. You could have noone and nothing and have to do it all from scratch by yourself.

Stay away, as much as possible, from physical items.

They will serve as a pair of handcuffs and make your life harder to move around in.

If you feel comfort in things you should try to get out more and experience what else life can give you.

Sell it all or give it away. It's fake comfort and it comes with a different cost than what you paid for it in the first place.

I have hundreds of computer and service manuals for electronics that I will never see again. Part of me wants to give it away, part of me wants to retire and open a vintage repair shop. Everyone under 30 sees it as a pile of trash. Worst case scenario: they can all be thrown into the recycle bin.

Here is the hard one: photos, report cards, all of the "familial documentation." I am a technically-only child and will have no children myself. What will I do with these photos of my mother as a young girl? I've no-one to pass them onto.

I guess somebody will come up with an app to sort all this out so that a few of those objects can find new users.

The amazon of used stuff.

Not to mention the recycling of things people nobody wants.

One of the hardest things in life is knowing when to cash in your chips. Most wait too long.

I’ve already told my wife that when her parents die we are just going to burn the house down. I’m just half joking.

I truly don’t understand people that fill up their homes with stuff. You can’t take it with you. And I have no intention of sorting through it. It’s all going straight to the landfill.

This is the most first world problem I've ever seen.

Recently had to do something like this. Here is how I wrapped my mind around it:

Get a large number of identical plastic storage boxes, take a quick picture of everything as you put it in a box, fill the box, put a number on it, take a picture of the box - done. Repeat.

This helped me bypass the physical organization stage of sorting, because before you pack everything, you don’t know what exists yet. Once everything is boxed up and documented, all you have to do is make an excel sheet of what is in each box, and then search through that instead of searching through a physical box.

Tl;dr > replace physical sorting with digital sorting.

I'm planning on burning my house down.

not surprised, the cheap crap we buy from china isn't worth keeping.

This is what I think of when all of these headlines about boomer-to-millineal wealth transfers come out every few months.

How is this a good thing? How does this wealth transfer help decentralize the wealth in the US?

The only thing I’m probably being left is a vintage collection of HGTV Magazines and piles of depreciating assets.

I'm just curious how boomers lived through the great depression.....

Wasn’t this the case with every generation? This is not boomer specific at all.

It will be handled the exact same way it always has: 90% of the time it's off-loaded at a garage sale, at Goodwill, on E-bay or otherwise sold - almost always below market value because the survivors can't be bothered - they just want it gone.

This is the very basis of yard sales and antiquing.

It's how I get a 1999 BMW Z3 with 20K miles back in 2008 for $5K bundled with a Mac Cube and several $K of other goodies from a widow of a former Apple employee. She just wanted it gone. I didn't even "hardball" her - I gave her what she asked for all of it!

I got a vast stamp and coin collection from my father: my sibs who live within 50 miles of my mother wanted nothing to do with it; she's getting on and needed to deal with it - I was willing to come across the country to take it all. Now I have quite a collection of both valuable stamps and a ton of gold and silver.

It's how you get cheap Ham radio gear, machine tools and furniture also - estate sales.

The article is ignorant of all of this apparently. Never had anyone close to them actually die perhaps. The "problem" will solve itself and no one will notice it ever was a problem!

This article makes me sad. Is this all what it remains when someone passes away? A headache, an unpleasant chore? What about memories? Do people have no feelings? Are they so selfish?

Here comes another post to promote "own nothing" era.

> Kevin Cameron, whose father died last year and whose mother is in a nursing home, must now decide what to keep or toss from their cluttered home in Shelburne, N.S.

this doesn't seem like a difficult decision.

Somehow I am not very moved by people who have inherited houses having to go to the bother of sorting through yet more stuff they've inherited along with real-estate. For many younger people in the US (perhaps even most of them?) buying a house is either a pipe dream or a life-long debt-servicing endeavor.