A Queasy Selling of the Family Heirlooms
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InheritanceFamily HeirloomsMinimalism
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Inheritance
Family Heirlooms
Minimalism
The article discusses the emotional dilemma of dealing with inherited family heirlooms, and the discussion revolves around the practical and emotional considerations of keeping or letting go of these possessions.
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My wife started collecting fine tea sets ever since her mother-in-law asked her how she prepares tea. ("I'll show you how we prepare tea...") My wife does not drink tea. I do.
I say don't be a slave to possessions. Enjoy what you have, and what you inherit. If they become a burden, let someone else enjoy them. Life is too short to worry about things.
Time to make myself another cup.
Curious about this. Does it mean he is throwing away things with sentimental value?
Just wanted to probe the idea of a self-proclaimed hoarder evaluating someone else’s tendency as “too eager”… by asking how you know.
They lived a comfortable middle class life, and that fear never materialized. But they were still prepared in case it did. And they passed that kind of thinking on to the next generation.
In a little more detail, I think that previous generations were time-rich and stuff-poor. Objects were laborious to make so people had few of them but also more time on their hands. That meant it was reasonable to obligate someone to spend a little time keeping and maintaining an object even if you weren't likely to use it often.
But now thanks to automation, globalization, and other stuff, physical objects are cheap. And thanks to an infinite number of media services who want to vacuum up every moment of our attention, time is costly. So objects come and go in our lives because it's not worth spending any time holding on to a thing you could just buy again when you need it later.
While I certainly take advantage of the convenience of cheap stuff, I don't think our current situation is really healthier.
I try not to collect things. But I noticed I have an increasing number of gaiwans. Somehow, I always find an excuse to acquire another one...
(Them gaiwans are of the "I won't be too sad if the kid breaks one" variety. Props to the kid for not having broken any yet, despite regularly enjoying a variety of oolongs/pu-erhs/greens...)
Worried what the ghost of granny will think? Ghosts don't exist.
The attachment to these things is a distant echo of when they were signs of social status, when maybe 1% of households, the rich ones, would have silver flatware (and the servants to keep it polished.) Now? They are superfluous matter than serves to weight down our lives.
The bottom line is, you should sell silver if you feel like the sale price is worth it, or you personally hate it. Not because you dream of solar panels and what not, that hardly use much of it at all. As with most manufactured goods, it is better to sell silverware to continue to be used as silverware, than to scrap it.
The top 1% own ETF shares, and the top 0.001% own industries.
In almost all cases of "heirlooms", the area of land taken up by the object is worth more than the object. Other than gold, very little stuff has enough value density.
We'd be seeing even more of that if zoning didn't restrict it.
Modern industrial forces are generally far, far more powerful than we realize. The great Falun mine, jewel of Sweden, producer of 2/3rds of all Europe's copper, builder of empires, produced 3,000 tons/year at its absolute peak; today, current copper production is quite mechanized and produces 18.3M tons/year. There is approximately nothing we can do by hand, or with our household items, that matches the power of industry.
But silver, with its small production, is a bit of an outlier. Worldwide silver production is only 25k metric tons/year, so if each of 131 million US households has a 52-piece set of .925 sterling silver at 1 troy oz sterling silver/piece, that is 0.925 * 52 piece * 1 troy oz/piece * 31.1g/troy oz * 131 million or 196k metric tons. Obviously nowhere near every household will have a full 52-pc set, some will have none and some will have larger sets, but if even 1/4 of households sell just one set, that is two entire years of worldwide silver production; the effects would be massive.
You are right about silver production but the cost of silver is negligible in any product except for actual silver jewelry and tableware. It is not worth badgering people to part with precious personal items to save $0.50 per solar panel or some shit. The price of silver is $41 per troy oz, or a little over a dollar per gram. Getting rid of silver for this reason is like getting rid of diamond jewelry because someone could use those diamonds to make high-precision cutting equipment for manufacture of EVs and solar panels. Everything you touch on a daily basis can be used for something else. You don't need to feel guilty because someone else might want it more. The market system we have ensures that if someone else wants it more than you, for a sufficiently good reason, they can prove it by simply buying it at the asking price.
I just went and counted our stainless steel set: 79 pieces.
Actual silverware became obsolete in 1913 with the invention of stainless steel. That people keep it around is almost pathological.
You might say that porcelain made earthenware obsolete, cheap glass makes porcelain obsolete, or plastic makes everything obsolete, or stainless is chemically better than everything else. People like what they like. I think you all have a pathological obsession with this issue and telling people that their choices suck lol.
>someone could use those diamonds to make high-precision cutting equipment
Funny enough, I actually do use monocrystalline diamond tooling (not for EVs or solar panels.) I would never tell someone to sell their family jewels, and they would almost certainly get pennies on the dollar if they tried.
I understand it's somewhere in the neighborhood 10% of the production cost of a PV module.
Brass tableware would be the least expensive material for this purpose.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligodynamic_effect
In the latter case, there's a much less expensive option available to improve your health instead of buying silver plates...
Coming up: - convert kitchen lighting to led from halogen tubes (ballasts are failing so may as well redo it all) - repair/replace parts of the fireplace outside because it was built with indoor bricks instead of outdoor so it's breaking apart
That's just off the top of my head... I have a list of projects but I'm not getting out of my chair to get it :)
There's something similar going on with my grandmother's house, which my mother is hanging on to but no longer going to use as a holiday home quite so often now she's passed her 80th birthday. It has in it a piano (archetypal item that costs more to move, let alone store, than it's worth) and, yes, a set of china and wedding silverware.
For the person that inherited it, they exist as a memento of childhood. Their parents big parties were only a small part. Keep a couple little pieces.
These also might have been, in some sense, insurance policies. Some of your ancestors might even have been second-class citizens in your country. The silverware might have been their best way of storing any value at all. I don’t know if I believe in spirits. But if you end up selling it off for what seems to you to be a trivial sum: that’s because your family was successful enough to not end up needing it. I think the spirits are proud.
That's a lovely thought!
Old China patterns are very hard to sell as well. Younger people have no interest in things which can’t go in a microwave and need to be hand washed.
I've got the Fiesta Ware bowl that my mom kept along with her Geiger counter, until she moved from her house to a small apartment.
Most of the art you see in museums is technically on permanent loan.
So, yeah, it's a lot of mixed feelings. There are certain things that it's easy to know what to do with. For example, I inherited a box, which is worth maybe $1k at most on the market, but which was part of a story which has been passed down in my family for 800 years. It's really nice to be able to finish that story with "and we still have the box." So, yeah, its easy to know I'm never getting rid of that one.
But there are other things that I kinda wish I didn't have to take care of. Now I have at least four more colonial dressers than I have room for. Marie Kondo would say that if it doesn't give me joy, I should get rid of it. And they don't give me joy. But getting rid of something that has been in my family for 300 years just because it doesn't fit in my house right now, that would give me guilt. I'm not sure that's healthy, but it's true.
I grew up in a house that was a lot like a museum, full of antiques, don't touch, hey that's older than the US, don't play on that. My mother did too. I don't know if that was always the best environment for a kid, but it did teach me a reverence for the past and for history.
So, I try to be a good custodian of the past. Visitors to my house might not know much about Ras Gugsa, Mother Seton, or Boudwyn of Constantinople, but I have interesting items on display that often prompt questions, so I can then tell stories. It's the other things, the dressers and silver chafing dishes, that are a burden rather than a privilege to have. I'm not sure how to have one without the other.
One thing that I've noticed is that a lot of the more guilt-burdensome items, not just for me but for people in general, are those things that used to be valuable and prestigious but aren't anymore. In 1920, a top hat or silver chafing dish showed you had class. Now, those things don't signify anything. But their importance to our ancestors of a previous time lingers on a bit. We feel like even though they are worth little that they should be worth more somehow. I suspect that in a few generations our grandkids' generation will be stressing over what to do with our Rolex watches and Coach bags.
When my mother died she left behind a rather large collection of collectable dolls — not my thing, and not heirlooms for sure. (They represented I think the first time she finally had disposable income — at like age 60 or so. So she collected these things she liked.)
Regardless, I wasn't about to dump them at a local Goodwill. They meant something to her and I was quite sure she would want them to go to someone who would appreciate them as much as she did — to another doll collector I thought.
The thought of the tediousness of selling them though had me packing them up and storing them first in a storage unit in Morgan Hill for several years — even after I had moved with the wife back to the Midwaste.
A trip out to California in the van-turned-RV though and I finally brought them to Nebraska — first in my garage, then down into the basement. But again they sat for years.
This year I made a kind of resolution to "live more lightly" and so began the process of putting each doll up on eBay.
I came to learn about the dolls as I created little descriptions for the listings, tried to answer the odd question that a potential bidder had. In fact in the end I ended up keeping one of the dolls in memory of my mother. (One doll for some reason I kept coming back to look at — had a hard time imagining selling it because it was so ... stunning.) My daughters also each picked out a doll to keep in memory of grandma.
Yeah, heirlooms, etc. can be a kind of burden. As a parent myself now I make a point to let my girls know that they can toss anything of mine they wish to once I shrug off this mortal coil.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_death_cleaning
Do people call the United States midwest the "Midwaste" now? Is it meant to insult people because of where they live?
Protip: the Midwest is horrible and full, go back to New York or California.
I live in the midwest and this is the first time I've seen/heard it.
It's hard. I have/had some things I really like and/or are useful. But although I have a fair bit of storage space in my house, I'm taking a really close look at what will ever emerge from the box it's stored in.
1. buy treadmill from Amazon with one click, delivered to your door
2. put it in the living room corner
3. after a while, put it in the garage
4. more time passes, move it to the storage unit
5. take it to the dump
Amazon could do us all a favor, and have one-click send it directly to the dump.
In a fit of efficiency (when the ADHD meds kicked in, and after my wife and I getting fed up of having to squeeze past the boxes) I donated about 80% of them. And then three days ago I stumbled across a handwritten codicil to my grandmother's will where she described in painstaking detail the provenance of each piece, what it meant to her and an anecdote or two about it.
I was devastated, for a few different reasons, my grandmother specifically wanted these things to stay in the family and they'd been cherished and preserved, and I'd just given most of them away. These objects are somehow a repository of all these unprocessed feelings I have about family splits and the grief of losing family contact and continuity. And yet before I knew their stories I was judging them simply on how much I liked or didn't like them and how often I could see us using them.
If I'd discovered the codicil beforehand I'd have had a much harder time deciding what to do with it all. It sounds trite but that handwritten document is actually more of a treasure than the objects themselves.
The stuff? Just materials passing through time and space.
At least then they have to find it and display it when you visit out of fear of being dewilled.
Fine.
A storage locker because you have too much stuff and have no real plans to buy a second home or move somewhere bigger?
Not so fine.
Does it really make sense to store. And do you actually want to reuse it. Especially if it is say some particle board and not full wood.
* Boxes for various bits of electronic gear that I may sell at some point and will net a better value if I have the original packaging. This has proven worthwhile in the past as I explored my synth hobby.
* Halloween and Christmas decorations, because my wife decorates for the holidays like an exuberant goth Clark Griswald.
The unit is 90% the latter.
I've thought long and hard that we shouldn't own more than we can hold on our property. I've even thought that maybe we should move into a bigger house with more storage in order to achieve that goal.
But then I realized that a storage unit is essentially a much cheaper version of that second sentence. Here in Seattle, uprgading to an even slightly bigger house would be an enormous increase in our mortgage, would incur a large costly move, and risks having to change schools for my kids.
Compared to that, a storage unit is a much cheaper, easier option.
I would still prefer to not have it, and I'm enough of a minimalist that I could get by fine without it. But marriage is a partnership and those decorations bring her (and the rest of our neighborhood) a lot of joy, so here we are.
$400/mo is highway robbery.
So much of this should never have been acquired.
That can be said about so much...
I fully agree. My mother was a compulsive buyer and holder.
My brothers and I literally had to sort, evaluate, sell, recycle thousands of items. I found stuff like a knife to cut a birthday cake with a button so that it plays the "happy birthday to you" song. Fake candles, with an electrical wire: she'd buy five identical boxes of those. Never saw them used once.
This served as a lesson to me: I'm not perfect but I'm working on it. Having lived in four different countries helped me understand minimalism too.
And, much more importantly, I definitely don't want my stuff to be a drain on my daughter. The first thing I told her: have zero regret, zero hesitation, about throwing out stuff that belonged to me. Anything that doesn't talk to you: throw it, sell it, give it. I don't care and you shouldn't either.
Pro tip: if one wants to collect stuff, at least collect things that are going to last. For example instead of collecting Labubu dolls, collect gold coins instead. Gold doesn't rust. And at least you'll pass down something valuable to your kid(s). Focus your compulsive hoarding tendencies on something that'll teach you something (gold coins are very good at teaching history). Gold has value since, literally, thousands of years. Can't afford a 1 oz coin? Save and buy a 1/10th oz instead.
I still have too much stuff. For example a real vintage arcade cab: this thing still works. Movers do actually swear when they have to move it. But at least I still play once in a while a game on it. And so does my daughter. This one is probably my worst offender but, well, it still brings me some joy so there's that.
You don't need all these items: don't be a wandering hyper-consumerist soul.
Here’s my plan - you’re welcome to copy it:
1. Make a video documenting each piece and its story while she’s still alive. Get her to tell the family history, where items came from, what they meant to her. This preserves what actually matters.
2. Set aside exactly three pieces that genuinely speak to me. Not “might be useful someday” - just three things I actually want.
3. At the funeral, announce anyone can take anything they want to remember her by. Let family self-select what has meaning to them.
4. Donate the rest wholesale to charity. Tax deduction should be around $25k - likely more financial benefit than selling piece by piece, with infinitely less hassle.
This honors the emotional value without inheriting the burden. The video preserves family history better than storing unused objects. And it avoids the soul-crushing experience of discovering your inheritance is worth less than a tank of gas.
$10 item sells for $9, charge and ship it, eBay takes its cut, barf. Garage sale or just donate would be simpler.
More generally, I do think it used to be more of a flea market even if I never found it a great selling platform for cheap items.
The wild thing is that “what actually matters” likely becomes “what doesn’t matter” after one more generation when people who never met the person in the video inherit the video.
We are all just here for a brief time and yet we (myself certainly included!) cling so hard to attempting to leave a mark.
Most people we know only think about us for a month or so after we’re gone. Only our closest family and friends think about us longer and even then maybe not so many years later.
Among the various records there were some that involved wills and estates—lists of who got what 200 years ago. Land, horses, money. It was fascinating in its own right, but I'll say that a video of any of those people talking about their life experience would have been absolutely incredible, if for nothing else but to conceptualize how extraordinarily the world has changed, while also feeling connection with the little human details of daily life that have likely remained much the same.
Or if it’s particularly local, check if the local library would like a copy.
Everyone knows it's almost always fraud, but practically no one is ever caught, so you feel like a chump unless you participate. It's taking advantage of a system with very poor enforcement. Professional accountants may even suggest it, and at times "appraisers" will play their part for a fee. Some people even try to convince themselves that it's technically legal, but I think even they know it's a lie.
It was much later that I realized “insurance price” was “the highest value we can justify” and really meant for tax purposes.
Obviously no. Insurance has to buy you the item new, used items sell for a fraction of the new price. Being confused by this makes me think you're new to living on earth.
What charity wants these antiques? Less hassle for you, I'm sure, but now a charity is going to have to deal with the stuff. Will they just throw it in the trash?
Most things that people don't want don't really have value to most anyone else either. They may be recycled at some level. But mostly it's just friction to get rid of it.
https://247wallst.com/special-report/2016/05/25/the-size-of-...
I have often observed that my dad's sisters and himself don't care enough about a lot of things that are old in our house. Mostly because they grew up seeing it or grew up with their parents obsessing over it.
But I wonder, what would the author's younger generation think about it? Because we didn't grew up with it. Everything around us is disposable. Lifeless. Valueless. We dispose the plates that we eat and things we have like we watch a new movie in Netflix.
So maybe her younger generation sees it from a different light? Cos every other night, they eat from disposable plates. Her generation can't buy the finesse the old generation things has (for things that are heirloom worth ofcourse).
My dad reads his newspaper in a chair which was auctioned out by the British after world war 2 financial troubles. My great grandfather bought it. And I sleep in in my great grandfather's bed. Both not things to care or is valued by my mom and dad. But very surreal whenever I think about it. We don't always have to go new.
Maybe give another generation chance to connect. Tell the stories about it to them. They maybe fascinated cos it's new with history to them while it was a day to day thing for the author herself?
Interesting read! Thank you.
Both parents in a care home, together and I am working to be able to take them back to the house for day trips, so installing a wheelchair bathroom, and a "day suite" off the kitchen selling whatever is worth cash, and has no real sentimental value to pay for it all.
A lot of 10 ipads from 2015, e-waste from her employer paying to get rid of them? I greedily ask for it and she indulges me but with a warning that I have six months to find utility.
Funny. I'm the one who played so many strategy games where buildings have carrying cost. Less is more. She is right of course. It's what we do with the thing that matters more than what it is. At the Goodwill Donation Centre when I falter she says "Take a picture and give it away". Good advice.
A unique challenge of our case is the legal status of some of these goods. For example, we have enough very fine elephant ivory artwork to fill entire storage units.
I dread having to sift through my parents house. My mom also loved her silver and China - polishing it was a chore that we could pick up as kids to earn a few bucks. The furniture especially is still in pretty good condition and is also just so much better made, with much better wood, but is in the completely the wrong style for our home.
They've been frank with us - they love their stuff, none of it is worth the time and effort it would take appraise and sell it, and we should pick anything we like and donate the rests.
I think it was kindly done. You don't have to give away your cherished possessions as long as you free your heirs from the guilt of getting rid of it. I love my shelves full of books, but they are meaningful only to me. The kids can take them to the charity or the library or the recycling place as far as I'm concerned.