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.
My grandmother came in for years and asked for handouts from stuff that was mine when I was younger. My mother kept giving her my old stuff. When I went to move out I went to look at the storage area and nothing that I really cared about was still there.
A few years ago my father mentioned all the toys I still had and that I should come and get them, I told him that They had already given away anything I cared about and all that was left was junk It just needed to go away. He got all defensive. But if you’re going to let somebody come in and take from a pool of goods they’re going to continually take the best things until there’s nothing useful left. I ended up with a small bucket of Legos and a couple of my favorite matchbook cars.
I’m not really sore about it, but at the same time him asking me to drive 7 hours and get the collection of broken items that were passed over No, either sell it in an eBay lot or throw it away.
What did your grandmother need with kids toys?
She ran this elaborate trade. She’d tell my mother she was giving them to my nephew or to some other relative, then I would check up with them and ask them how the toy was and they’d say what toy.
I don’t know whether they ended up in a thrift shop or some kind of trade-up rubber band for a car kind of thing.
She showed up this one time with her trunk absolutely full of just random garbage toys, Tell me to pick whatever I wanted for my birthday. I was around 16 I was like no no I’m good I’ll take a hug that’s all I need. You could see she was highly disappointed.
I was only marginally disappointed that none of my kids ended up with any of my toys but in the long run it’s not really that big of a deal. Those things all meant things to me, They likely never would have meant anything to my kids.