Maybe you’ll only be mostly dead.
I hope not! The burial would be scary.
I have a LOT of stuff. I’ve been downsizing over the last few years, but there’s still a lot here.
Valuables? Mostly art (Japanese woodblock prints, Heintz Art Metal vessels, other original paintings, 1920s pochoirs, some rare perfume bottles, and some relatively rare books). I know my niece and nephew don’t care, and they’re the only descendants from the four kids that are my siblings. My grand-nephew is too young to know if he cares.
I’ve already given my mom’s wedding china and silver to my niece, plus a few other things that I thought she’d like. She and her husband bought a new bigger house this summer, so I’ve passed on a few decor items that fit her taste.
Other than that, I’ll have to make notes on what are the more valuable items and hope it doesn’t all go to landfill. I know I have things that other collectors want, but selling it is such a hassle. My heirs probably won’t want the hassle, either.
There are a few art pieces that my kids might want, although they’re both teenagers now and couldn’t care less about them. They may change their mind someday. I’m not going to be butthurt if they end up in a thrift store. (Well, I’m not going to be butthurt anyway because I’ll be dead. But you know what I meant.)
I have a marble bust of Homer (the poet, not the yellow buffoon) made sometime prior to 1910 in Italy and shipped over when my great grandfather came to the U.S. via Ellis Island. I want that to stay in the family.
I will inherit from a family member an original Picasso. (Yes, original and yes, I’ve seen the paperwork showing provenance / chain of ownership and valuation and whatnot. It is real.) What will happen to that after my death… I do not know yet. Both my kids will want it but it may end up going to a museum.
Dealing with an estate is exhausting work and frankly 99.9999% of the stuff I own now is worth nothing to anyone but me and even then I’m not the type to have emotional attachments to “things,” with the possible exception of books. As I get older I want to have fewer things, not more things. What I would like to do is have a list – a short list – of the things that I want to go to certain people, and everything else can be tossed or taken to Goodwill. I am dreading having to do that with my parent’s estate, I am dreading having to do that with my in-laws estate, and I really, really don’t want to cause problems for my kin when I kick the bucket. Less is more.
I give a way a lot of items via Craigslist. I decided to take a look at this, but it doesn’t appear to be used in my area. Guess I’ll stick with CL for now.
I tried as well.
Not many people.
I created an account though.
Kijiji rules where I live.
CL no more.
One man’s treasure is another man’s junk.
My sister has reluctantly become a hoarder. Her husband’s family (distant aunts and cousins that have passed, etc.) have left him house’s full of furniture and brick-a-brack. It doesn’t fit in their house from capacity standpoint or style. He and my sister are too afraid of disappointing family members to not accept the furniture or even sell it. They have been led to believe that it’s very valuable…(it’s not). So the furniture is stacked around the house. My sister refuses to have people visit her at home because her house looks like a used furniture warehouse. I haven’t been in her house in over 15 years.
Be careful about the stuff you plan to leave people.
I don’t really have any prized possessions, with the partial exception of certain plants, including potted specimens like a variegated bougainvillea and the Clivia and pygmy date palm that I grew from seed and have had for a long time.
Since none of my relatives are into plants to any extent, they and my hundred or so fig trees will probably be left at the curb or hauled to the landfill when I’m gone. I might ask for some cuttings to be placed in my coffin to take to the afterlife.
Try as I might, I can’t find a safety coffin for sale - the kind in vogue during the 19th century when people feared being buried alive and there were contraptions with bells or other features to alert surface dwellers that you were Not Dead Yet. An enterprising person could make a few bucks selling wi-fi enabled safety coffins with an alert button you could press. It’d be hell though if the network went down at just the wrong time.
For sure. My in-laws spent most of their retirement collecting Coca-Cola memorabilia (not actually old stuff, just anything with Coca-Cola on it). Polar bear plush toys, dolls, toy trains, toy cars, various and sundry other Coca-Cola-related items. There is so much of it a full room in their home is dedicated to this crap - it’s set-up like a museum. A storage locker was rented to house all the boxes. They belonged to a CC collector’s club and went to their conventions. We advised my MIL to at least inventory the hoard, with attention first to anything of real value so that after they are gone we can separate the good stuff we can easily sell from everything else that gets hauled to the landfill. Those words never sank-in, and I fear we will just give it all to charity when the time comes.
Hoarding is collecting’s ugly cousin - there is a fine line that gets crossed at some point.
Maybe get the contact info for one or more of her Coca-Cola collector friends so you could contact them to make an offer after she passes?
I’ve been thinking about this more often of late. Nobody in my family is going to want my prized tin toy collection or all my Christmas ornaments, not to mention all my racing-related art. I think it might be time for me to open either an Etsy or ebay.
Throwing things away…that’s where I’m a Viking!
The thing is, someone living has to deal with your possessions. Plenty of heirs are in deep doo-doo with the material aftermath.
Odd - I always assumed you were someone that went around collecting discarded crap. 
People give me crap. Then I roll it up in a ball, and it goes …away.
This. My grandma’s husband cleared out the house. Broke up her spinning wheel and loom to burn and threw away all her Slovenian recipes. It was practically a crime. Then, when Mom died, I retrieved items with lithium batteries, light bulbs and other goods that my brothers kept dumping in the trash even though I stated I wanted to recycle them. I was appalled. But the amount of stuff was a bit overwhelming. Timo dumped a lot of valuable stuff before I started hauling things off to my house to be donated to the history museum or sold at an estate sale. Then, the asshat wanted to be sure that I split up all the money we made evenly by making other family members account for every penny. I want most of my stuff gone before he gets a chance to snicker over it.
I don’t have a lot of valuable or unique stuff. Though as a musician I have some rather good instruments which will still be classics for almost ever. I’ve left those in my will to musician friends, I like to think that they will still be played.
I fully appreciate the fact that 99.95% of people would have no clue about my vast Seeburg 1000 Background Music collection, nor the desire to know anything about it.
The problem is that the records are an oddball size (9" with a huge center hole), play at 16 2/3 RPM, and contain background music (an underappreciated genre).
I told my daughter that the individual records are worth about ten dollars each on eBay, but that’s just a general value, and the more desirable ones can bring a couple hundred for a full set of 7.
So, she can toss them in the dumpster; she can sell them all in a bulk lot for a couple thousand; or she can part them out over a year or two and get several thousand.
That’s not counting the value of the machines themselves.
As long as she’s happy, I don’t mind if she throws them all out when I’m gone. One of these days I’ll write up a document explaining where the value is and how best to put them on eBay.
My machine shop? That’s a lot easier for folks to part out–I’m not worried about what will happen to the tools.
If nothing else, PLEASE leave instructions to have the discs sent to archive.org. Keep them available as history. (Someone else saved the background music from kmart, and it is now available there under the search term “attention kmart shoppers”. The Christmas background music is a trip down memory lane.)
That is such a wonderful suggestion.
Thank you !