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.
Yeah, but there’s likely a house included in that. For some of you that’s the only house you’re going to get.
A small price to pay for having to take a load of Precious Moments to the tip.
I myself have a baby’s cot in the attic, courtesy of a mental mother-in-law. Nicotine stained blankets, the lot. I have no idea why. We don’t want kids. We have never expressed any interest in having one. It’s just taking up room. Shipped to us at great expense by somebody who I can only assume thinks she’s getting grandchildren out of this. She is not. Not from us anyway. So in the attic it will sit until she dies and then the missus can finally throw it away, safe from a random surprise inspection to make sure we still have it.
If it was left to me it would already be gone, probably into a bonfire.
What really pisses me off is that she had a NES in the room she kept this junk in. Didn’t fucking send us that.
A lot of these folks that rave about “owning their home” and about how “bad the younger generation is with money” have re-mortgaged their home to fund their insane lifestyles and owe enough that it’s just gonna be a headache for whoever “inherits” the poorly maintained asbestos farm.