Something all of you old fukkers (Me included) need to consider...
 

The time has come in my Mother's life for her to go into an assisted living facility. She should have been there 2 years ago.
Hard decisions were made by me, my 2 sisters being of little help.
Cleaning/mucking out her house, getting it ready to sell is #1 priority.
Hence the reason for this post.......pay attention.......

NOBODY WANTS TO INHERIT A HOUSE FULL OF SHIT....

Mom is pushing 90.
She has cards from every occasion dating back to 86.
National Geographic mags from 82.
A small mountain of Christmas shit.
I'll be tossing all of this next week, so the Earth will probably go off balance and send us hurtling into the Sun. Getting ready for pre Estate sales.
I merely mentioned that I was going to be selling the house ......already got 3 people wanting to buy.
I was aware of all of this bullshit, but strictly forbidden to get rid of it per moms orders. Now 97% of her shit will be sold, donated, or tossed. It was hard getting it by my sisters, but when I offered THEM the Power of Attorney, they crawdadded the hell out and but fast.

1)If your kids show no interest in yer shit, sell it before you croak, enjoy the $$$.
2) If you're prone to hoard stuffz.......get rid of it. It won't kill you.
3) Maintain your property for chrissakes. They did'nt. "Band aids" *Fixed* the problems around the house. It also cost the over 50K in possible revenue had the dated house (1968) had at least some renovation.

I've kept my shit minimal. My shop equipment will be gone in less than a month, via my bladesmith friends, with all proceeds going to my wife AND not selling them for what I told her I paid for the equipment.

Headed to Moms to measure and get shit ready for the movers....

Outta here..........T.H.E. Blademaker

Yeppers... My inlaws house is a full of stuff that most will go into a dumpster else it'd take 3 months to go through it all. I been on my FIL to sell off his hobby stuff because he's the only one knows what it is and worth. My MIL will be ripped off royally by family and buyers if he doesn't.
My MIL hides shit so things that are important (and money) will be lost.
It's hard to part with some stuff I know but it has to be done else like you said it screws the family.
Also if they do go into a home and money is needed everything's auctioned off and family gets squat.

You're a good son!

Just went through this with my MIL....We pulled her out of the Senior Facility and brought to our home for her final year. My wifes sister and brother did nothing to help...

There's a lot to talk about, so I'll start with this. We reduced all her banks/brokers accounts to one, credit cards closed, cable TV closed, anything that might cause an issue during probate was history.

My wife did the entire Probate process, lawyers wanted 700.00 per hour, no thanks.....

A older man years ago taught me this when selling his tools etc. Charge half the price of the piece in today's market. Example: table saw today say sells for 500.00- sell yours for 250. In most cases you'll get back what you paid plus free use. Of course if at all possible.....

The mountain of "stuff" I have will be a huge problem, now my wife has very little in "Stuff"....

I tossed 4 20 yard dumpsters full of stuff when I cleaned out my parents house after my dad passed. He wasn't a hoarder, he was a collector, which is worse sometimes. 3 generations of stuff in the house. It was brutal.

I had no involvement in the sale and disposal of mom & dads home and contents when they passed. My 3 sisters handled it all. Including the sale of the home.
I saw nothing. Not a dollar. And I was not consulted on anything, including the home sale (yes they know I'm a licensed real estate agent)
Whatever.

When my MIL got "up there" we moved her into a cottage I built for her on my property (I purchased a double lot for this intentention)
We sold everything including her house across town (I had built it for her as well).
When she passed my wife was ready to move on. I thought we could keep the home and the cottace we could rent out or have for guests. Nope. It was her moms and that was that.
Whatever.

I'm dealing with this now with my mother in law's house, my wife being POA. Her second husband died last year and was a borderline hoarder. Neatly arranged, but a big house, two car garage, basement and two barns packed full.

My wife flew up there a half-dozen times this past year to get the financials in order. This guy had all of his business paperwork filed since the 1970's, a lot of it with social security numbers of old employees. So she had to go through all of it page by page and shred all the secure material.

I told her to just have a service come in and shred all of it, but her mother insisted otherwise. Probably a wise decision, because among all that shit, he had hidden cash, us savings bonds, and still relevant bank information.

We're going up there in two weeks to bring her to NC. We will just abandon the house, and let her step brother deal with it.

Last year I did my side of the estate planning and basically have it bullet proofed. My son (from my first marriage) gets a designated life insurance policy and that's it.

He's a good kid, professional and all that and is not the type to deal with estate crap. I've talked with him on it and all fine.

Now if she is left. All will be sold or donated to maybe St Jude, Shriners or some Animal thing, Her siblings don't get jack shit.

Although she got the high end of 6 figures from her moms estate last year, the Jew brother who was also the executor, screwed her out of 200k.

The estate specifically said he was not to get a dime because he is already a wealthy man.

I went through this with my dad's estate in 2009-2011. What a mess. A lifetime of mostly crap. Degraded by lack of proper storage, etc. Two huge 20 yard dumpsters and more full of junk. Old files. Papers. Magazines. Broken furniture. Hippie macrame from the '60's. Crap. Mom's affairs were easier in 2021 because she had been slowly getting rid of stuff over time after her husband passed in 2015 and it was a small condo. I am looking at my own mountain of stuff, a lot of heavy greasy car parts and equipment, and seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, and am starting to downsize. On a positive note: people in their 70's and 80's who continue to buy crap and stash it away for a rainy day tend to live a long time. They still think they are 30 years old and will live forever. They never do, but oh what a mess they leave behind.

Obviously drawn up by a liberal. Punish the financially responsible and give the poor all the loot for 'fairness's sake'. And the poor who inherit the loot blow it on lotto tickets and meth and tattoos in a year and it's gone. Totally wrong-0 way to think, and what's fundamentally wrong with our society: thinking giving poor people stuff will transform them into responsible moral people. Nope.

I tossed numerous dumpsters worth of stuff from my in laws place and just this year did the first 20 yd from my parents basement to have repairs made to the basement. Looking back at the ridiculous things both of them “repaired” or “upgraded” over the years, while neglecting other more obvious things infuriates me at times, but in the end they did what made them happy, but no one wants all that crap

Less is more. Decluttering is the right thing to do for descendants.

OP is experiencing one of the most difficult tasks a relative can have. More difficult when family members sit back and criticise. It can break up a family.

This is so true and I was surprised how little my parents possessions meant to me when my dad passed in 2019. My sister lives in another state and was not able to be much help in the process and to her credit she left it all up to me. I was my parents final care giver for the last 10 years of the their lives with a lot of help from my wife, son and daughter.

When dad, my last parent, passed I did the following.

After he passed I took all the items he intended for me to have and got them out of the house.

After the funeral I allowed my sister to take what she wanted. Having to travel back home by air meant she didn't take much but she did get most of mom's personal items when she died 2 months prior.

The next weekend I allowed my kids to come get what they wanted. They took most of the smalls and some furniture. I also had a 40 yard dumpster dropped and the next day we tossed all the remaining smalls that we could not donate. This left a house empty of most everything but furniture.

I then called a friend with a second hand store to come get the rest of the furniture. He gave me a couple grand and made a pretty good profit on the furniture. It also meant we didn't need to handle it ourselves, he just came with a couple guys and took it out.

I sold the house along with mine 5 doors down the street the next week and moved into the home we planned on retiring in.

Some people thought I was too cold about the process but when you're grieving the loss of a parent the little stuff no longer matters. This was my methodical way of coping with the situation and looking back I don't think I would have handled it any different.

blah blah blah
Pics of mom?

:leaving:

my parents have so much crap and they think my brother and I want it. Nope, but they keep buying and hoarding more junk. There are a lot of cars going to the junk yard and most of the shit in the garage is going to the scrap yard for whatever $$ we can get.

been there, done that.

Every time I see my parents and the topic of their shot comes up I make it very clear we don’t want their shit. I keep telling them to sell everything and party out their days as we don’t want it. “But this was your great uncle Harry’s”. “Dad, I never met Harry, have only seen him in pictures, and don’t really care about his cuckoo clock.”

Boomers are just hoarders of stuff.

no Taco Bell then...

My dad was never a hoarder by any stretch, I used to joke that if he bought something and didn’t use it for a month, out the door it went. He went to assisted living from a nice 55+ community, he had some nice stuff. He immediately started selling his furniture to his neighbors and half of it was gone quick. I remember him calling me before he moved and asking if he could borrow our card table and chairs, he had sold his dining room set and his bar stools and didn’t have anything to eat on…miss you dad…

Dealing with "the stuff" is bad, but dealing with a stubborn parent is worse. My MIL is dying of cancer, six months to live, we've arranged the best nursing home close by to care for her. This is after 14 months of dealing with the estate and the hoarded crap.

The alternative is for her to die in a house that she no longer enjoys, through another New York winter, 12 hours away from her daughter. Two weeks ago she agreed to the move, we set a date one month ahead, made first class travel arrangements, and paid $10k, non-refundable, to reserve the room in the interim.

My wife just made her daily call, and her mother began the conversation by saying that she might want to wait until spring...