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.”
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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.
I’ve spent the last two decades training my parents to understand that I generally don’t want their hand-me-downs, and probably don’t want a lot of their belongings when they depart this world. Maybe a few items that have sentimental value, but the rest will likely be sold, assuming we can find people to buy it. And they do have a lot of stuff. Some of it valuable art and trinkets they’ve collected over the years. Very little of it resonates with me, though. They’re in their 80s now, so we’ve had discussions about plans between them and my older brother and myself. There are trusts. We have access to their accounts. I count myself lucky that they’re so practical.