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The great junk transfer is coming

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Re: The great junk transfer is coming

#31

Post by sk55 »

motohagiography wrote: post #24

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 digitize all of the photos so they’re preserved and organized. That way you can feel a little better about getting rid of the prints.

Re: The great junk transfer is coming

#32

Post by ars »

pessimizer wrote: post #19

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 d…

You have no items in your parents home that reminds you of something you did as a child? Nothing?

Re: The great junk transfer is coming

#33

Post by pessimizer »

FunnyBadger wrote: post #18

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 fro…

Death is the only way to obtain a lot of hobbyist board games. They usually only go through a printing or two, then are sold and traded for a few years after that until they find the collections that they're loved in, then they sit in those collections for another 50 years until the collector dies.

A collector dying is often cause for a feeding frenzy that will make a hundred people happy. I know of at least two game collectors who had time to plan who threw post-mortem potlatches where the people who they enjoyed playing those games with while they were alive divided the collections between themselves. I guarantee those friends did not feel burdened. Honestly as much an opportunity for renewal as a time of loss.

Re: The great junk transfer is coming

#34

Post by eddy_chan »

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).

Re: The great junk transfer is coming

#35

Post by HFguy »

flybrand wrote: post #8

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 Labyrin…

This is a bit of a random comment, but what you wrote was very evocative of similar experiences I've had.

Re: The great junk transfer is coming

#37

Post by girvo »

ars wrote: post #32
pessimizer wrote: post #19

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 d…

You have no items in your parents home that reminds you of something you did as a child? Nothing?

I don't. We moved too much. Aside from computers and video games, there wasn't really any "stuff" that survived all those moves. Even less survived 13 years after moving out. My parents were always pretty ruthless about culling things.

Re: The great junk transfer is coming

#38

Post by pessimizer »

ars wrote: post #32
pessimizer wrote: post #19

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 d…

You have no items in your parents home that reminds you of something you did as a child? Nothing?

I generally don't need to be reminded of the things I did as a child. Anyway, what am I going to do with these things, put them in my closet to burden my heirs?

If I see something useful that also reminds me of my parents or my childhood, all the better. But it has to be something that's integrated into my life, not something that I'm attaching to my life because I'm afraid to give anything up.

edit: I do have to say that there might be a subtext in the article that I agree with. The useless stuff that your kids will have to deal with after you die is probably also useless to you now, so you should deal with it now.

Re: The great junk transfer is coming

#39

Post by bruce511 »

Scoundreller wrote: post #26
FunnyBadger wrote: post #18

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 fro…

Oh man, stamps, for the past 10 years I’ve bought “discount” stamps off eBay. Basically buying 45cent or whatever stamps for 25 cents or less and plastering my packages like the… never mind. Obviously this is the lossy side of stamp collecting, but man, to take a haircut like that after preserving something for 20 or 30 years.

With very rare exceptions, even giant stamp collections are worthless. Stamp collecting is all about collecting, not disposing.

Sure there are catalogs that detail the "listed price" of a stamp, but that's the dealer price to you, not the price they'll buy it at (which is likely Apart from the selling issue, is the searching issue. You might inherit a collection of a few thousand stamps, but it's unlikely to be sorted by value. Which means it has to be examined. By a professional. Which takes time. So there goes any value in it. Which is why a dealer will only pay pennies for a whole collection - it'll chew their time separating the wheat from the chaff.

Best thing you can get any collector to do is dispose of all the value in their collection, or clearly separate the value from the rest, before they pass.

Now me, I have books. Lots and lots of books. The kids will love inheriting those... :)

Re: The great junk transfer is coming

#40

Post by jamal-kumar »

laurieg wrote: post #27

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 sp…

I live out of a carry on bag mostly. My stuff is pretty minimal but the heaviest things I own are the books. I have some really weird old ones too, like one for learning german from 1939 and another on how to survive an atomic bomb from 1946. Just weird shit that's hard to find and hard to let go of.

I tend to like doing book trades though so it pays off on my travels.

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