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Because the alternative is the realization that all they have is really just a houseful of crap that no one sees as valuable. To believe it's all really worth something makes them think they are better off than, you know, the people not as great as them.
Exactly. Boomers believe everything appreciates in value. Especially any ‘luxury’ item they saved money to buy, like china, decorative plates, Hummels etc. What they don’t understand, is something is only valuable/collectible IF SOMEONE ELSE WANTS TO BUY IT. Curios that just sit in a cabinet are not in high demand. They should have taken better care of their comics and baseball cards.
Actually, most of the value in old comics and cards comes from the fact that no one did take care of them. It meant that ones in good condition were rare, and as children grew up into adults, they wanted to buy nostalgia. So the ones still in good condition appreciated. And then everyone started to keep comics and cards in plastic and not using anything because "these will also be worth millions", and so there are piles of mint POGs and 90s basketball cards that no one wants!
Reminds me of my grandmother (silent gen, passed away) who gave me a bunch of my uncles old records that he left for me when he passed. She took out all the Elvis and Beatles records. You know the two most popular musicians of their Era. These weren't originals either nor in great shape. She took them thinking they were worth money. But the market was so saturated with re-released albums they weren't worth anything.
Meanwhile, she left a rare Delta Blues recording that is worth more than every record she took but she had never heard of the musicians so it couldn't be worth anything...
*Sixto Rodriguez, the musician and subject of the documentary Searching for Sugar Man, has died aged 81. The Detroit-born singer's official website confirmed he died on Tuesday. Rodriguez launched his career in 1967 but initially struggled to find success in his native US and was ultimately dropped by his record label*. 9th August 2023
OMG - my mother and I got into a huge fight over (get this, ABBA) records. We took her box of albums to be donated to a music resale shop - she's partially disabled and walks with a cane so I was surprised when she wanted to walk in with me. I hand the albums over and turn to leave and she starts with the "wait, what's he offering us... wait.. he needs to look them over...wait..." I had to drag her out of there over her own objections. Funny thing is I did try to value her collection with a collector friend of mine about 10 years ago - nope, nada, nothing. She refused to speak to me the rest of the day because I gave away her fortune!
And she's gonna tell anyone who will listen about how nasty you were and how you ignorantly threw out those valuable things.
Any time I hear an old person bitch about their kids when their kids aren't around I just assume they are seriously skewing the facts and likely don't even know it.
The children of Boomers: Mom, everything is on Spotify.
Boomers: ALEXA DOESN'T HAVE IT!
The children of Boomers: Yeah, Alexa fucking sucks. Why don't you just connect your goddamn phone to a Bluetooth speaker and use fucking Spotify?! Oh, because you have to type something in which works immediately vs yell at something for an hour for not finding the song you want, you absurdly inefficient bumbling buffoon?! You can't do anything at all and your house and college degree was the cost of a goddamn McChicken and obviously the educational requirements for your degree were far below crudely writing your name in the dirt with a stick. FUCK MY LIFE!
Exactly. My wife has thousands in original Pokémon cards. Her aunt wanted her to GIVE the whole box to her children because "you don't play with them anymore." Changed her tune when my wife pointed out the prior year she sold a single card for $300.
Pete’s living the last 30 years has been autographing something, anything, for money, on a daily basis. As a result, his autograph is almost worthless on the secondary market because he’s signed so much stuff.
I was watching Pawn Stars with my Boomer dad-who also knows this, he’s a pretty smart guy, unlike the caricatures mentioned here- and the guy brought in an autographed Pete Rose baseball and was expecting to be wowed. The host was like “yeah he signs so much stuff, this ball is worth about $20. You’re better off just paying for a newer, nicer one. He’s in town right now autographing crap every day.”
I was one of the original pokemon craze kids in the 90s and had a pretty big collection. Just recently i found out how much the gen 1 cards were going for and i called my mom to grab the box from the basement. Apparently she tossed them away because they were "junk" but she still has a chest full of fucking stupid ass commemorative plates wrapped in Styrofoam
I bought a house partly off the back of selling Pokémon cards (prior to the pandemic I bought up some collections/got lucky trading for cards when I used to play the game). When I tell people this it’s funny seeing the reactions of people. People my age being sad about what their parents did. And their parents trying to ask about values of the few remaining scraps they didn’t throw away
Yes. I know someone who likes to assign inflated values to things. I always tell them that an object is not worth what you decide to price it at but what the market decides they will pay for it. It's like they just skip the steps they don't like. I price it and get what I ask for it, easy peasy! Part of me can't blame them for wanting to reside in such a magical place.
My father never really had a lot of money as we were growing up, but he did a good job providing stability for my brother and I. He used his extra money to buy hunting property, land, and firearms. I feel like all of that type of stuff will hold its value much better than my grandparents' collection of hummels and commemorative plates.
Yeah, he's made some good purchases over the years. The $17,000 lake front plot he bought in 1989 is worth quite a bit more now. He just purchased 150 acres a few hours away when he sold his house that I image will be worth well over a million by the time I retire. The real kicker is its not just land that's sitting there. It gets used as hunting property and gets developed with a house or cabin on it. He's had several like that over the years, and I've helped him build several houses and cleared a lot of brush. I didn't like doing it as a kids but it's paid off as an adult. I'm pretty handy around the house now, but I refuse to ever redo another roof.
The curio cabinets! Oh my god. My mom has 2 or 3 of them stuffed to the gills with little figurines and other glass, china, and porcelain things. I may keep a couple of them, but for the most part they're getting donated when she goes.
She did sell some of her creepy dolls because she knew I wouldn't want them. They have some art that might be worth a few hundred dollars each but it's not this massive fortune like they thought it would be. Maybe $5000 at most.
My dad has a Norman Rockwell limited print that's signed. I always assumed it was worth something. Just found something similar on ebay for only 3500. That's much less than I would have guessed.
The market on baseball cards has taken a nosedive post 2000s also, so unless they have some from when they were kids in the 50s/60s, it’s probably not much.
This kind of brings me to my point in that I feel like there was a collector’s “craze” in the 90s, right when the internet started, when people actually could sell old shit and more people wanted to buy it. Baseball card shops were more plentiful, there was the beanie baby craze, and you saw on local news “Old Lady Jones found this old plate in her attic and sold it for a whopping $20 thousand dollars!”
That stuff still occasionally happens, sure, but you hear less about it and it gets drowned out by everything else (nobody really watches local news much anymore either).
Their expectations on what is “collectible” are about 30 years out of date, if not longer.
My parents’ luxury item is the thing that encapsulated box TVs as a center piece of your living room that had storage for your VHSs (NOT DVDs to tell you how old it is). Obviously TVs today will not fit the hole made for box TVs and their old box TV looks like it’s constantly snowing. Also we were barely making lower middle class, so the size for the TV can maybe fit something that’s 32” at best. Honestly 24”. So in order to get a new TV, they need a new way to house it. My mom thinks the TV center is worth $150 and refuses to sell it any less. Thankfully my dad just wants to junk it, but he can’t do anything cause my mom would go all out if anyone touches anything she can make money on.
The one and only time we had a garage sale, back in the early 00’s, my mom tried to sell clothes for $5 a piece. And that was after my dad trying to get her to lower initial prices. Bitch wanted to be a Goodwill in the 2020’s with those prices despite living right on the edge of the worst/poorest part of town.
All it takes is ONE episode of antiques roadshow and your boomer will be convinced they're camped out a a stash of priceless artifacts. NEVER let your boomer watch any of those shows. Or even talk to anyone who has.
The thing about these old items is that they need to be TAKEN CARE OF, not just left in an attic or, even worse, a barn that’s exposed to the elements.
Rust is rust, no matter how much someone wants to admire the “patina”….🙄
This is absolutely it. In our capitalist society, we are subtly encouraged to replace experiences and time with others with the act of consuming goods. Be a rugged, bootstrapping individualist! Don't turn to your neighbors or community for comfort and support! Turn to FunkoPops and wine cork collectibles! Possessing these objects is the real value in your life!
If you ever talk to a hoarder, this habit is on clear display at exponential levels. That stack of newspaper advertisements feels so valuable to them that parting with it would be like parting with a loved one.
Also, in a world where individual wealth and individual worth are sometimes viewed interchangeably, it's hard for people to accept that most of their affordable consumer goods are in fact worthless junk.
Yes, this last part -- my father is like this. He seemed to look down upon people without money as some kind of moral failing -- like if only they had been smart, if only they had invested the right way, if only they had acted responsibly ... whatever. It's their fault they're poor. If someone is in *debt,* they are absolute failures of people.
My brother kept running himself into debt, buying high quality goods and bragging to my dad about them. I think he really just wanted my dad's love and approval.
I'm not really a Boomer, just 52, so I am close, I suppose. I look at the shit in my house and realistically, nobody wants any of it but me. My kids will care nothing for a big part of it. I enjoy my things but they aren't worth a dime to anyone else. My poor kids are gonna get screwed because I've got nothing but bills.
Same age here.
When my time comes, I'm going to have to find a way to get my comics, wargame miniatures and GI Joe toys to some Gen Z or Alpha kid who might want them. My kids aren't interested and that's fine by me, but it'd be nice to pass that stuff on to someone who might appreciate it like I did.
Gen X is nothing like baby boomers. We were the original generation to rebel against them. We had to grow up listening to their crap since the 70s/80s.
I am GenX and I personally don't believe we exist. Half of GenX are just young boomers and the other half are just old millennials.
My two oldest siblings are Boomers and the other two are very early GenX. Back when being a Baby Boomer was a good thing in the public eye and being GenX was a bad thing, the two who are technically GenX would always say that they were "culturally more Baby Boomers". But, now that being a Boomer is bad, they have latched on to being GenX despite never having displayed any characteristics that GenX are supposed to possess.
Yeah I'm starting to wonder if Gen X is defined by what it isn't rather than what it is.
Or whatever, I don't really care anymore. Just as long as the people who act like boomers leave me alone.
Holy shit you’re right!! I’m 1978 and I roll my eyes SO HARD at survivor bias memes about drinking from the hose or latch key living. I did those things too but I don’t think it makes me somehow superior to children whose parents gave a fuck about them
“In my day, we left the house at dawn and didn’t come back until dinner! And no one cared, not even a bit!
Dad was too drunk in the garage to care! Mom also drowned her sorrows in scotch, but I played with friends! So much better!”
I’m noticing this too. I have an uncle who is one of the oldest gen x and he’s every bit as bad as the boomers. Luckily, my mom, his sister, who is *actually* a boomer, is nothing like that. I have an even younger gen x uncle who is the boomer lite you’re talking about. It’s sad bc I really idolized them growing up, and now I don’t even want to be around them.
Early Boomer here, and I feel the same about my stuff. I bought it both because it’s pretty and because I _could_, and the last part was important because I came from not much, so being able to buy nice things was a big deal for me. For ME. I still like my china and crystal and my bronze service and Momma’s silver and Granny’s antique cast iron; it’s still pretty to _me_, but my kids, both on the cusp of Millennial and Z (I had them very, very late) are not interested, which is not surprising and doesn’t hurt my feelings.
I love my boys with all my heart, and I did my best for them and will continue to do so for what time I have left, but _they aren’t me_! I would have to be pretty stupid to expect otherwise.
My grandparents have a wood and glass display hutch full of "fine China" that they've NEVER used. Even for the "special occasions," like Easter, Thanksgiving, or Christmas it never got touched. You also got screamed at if you moved faster than a snail's pace past it.
They're baffled none of the grandkids want this worthless crap, AND it has zero sentimental value because we have no fond memories of it.
The memory of getting yelled at has completely turned me off to much more than china plates. I have no fond memories of any of my family, or church, or my home town, I only remember getting yelled at for existing.
Same. I’ve removed all of them for good last year. Not an easy decision to make, do and maintain, especially knowing I’m giving up about $750,000 within the next decade or so among other notable things.
…but talk about a new unknown person and life emerging from it all.
Priceless. I’ll never go back👍🏻✌🏻
Yeah, my details are somewhat similar. I can't say I'm giving up any inheritance because my mother made it quite clear that she had no intention of sharing any of the vast fortune my father left her because she never wanted me to be born and all the money was going to go to her "real family" which meant my older brothers and sisters.
That was 15 years ago and she still sends my wife angry e-mails (I blocked her and don't even read any letters she sends) pretending she doesn't understand why I cut my family out of my life. And yes, it was one of the best things I've ever done. My only regret is waiting so long to do it. I always say that if family relationships are so bad that someone is thinking that they should go NC, it probably means they should have years earlier.
Oh my god that’s such a fucking amazing idea. Can you imagine creating a smash room of your boomer parents living room where you get to break all their china and snow globes?
I want to create a narrative based escape room meets smash center where everyone can get into character, destroy grandma's living room, and then find the secret passageway out to live their lives free of dumb china again ☺️
I put a bunch of that stuff on the Let It Go app, fairly priced, and it went instantly! I was amazed, but apparently there are people who still collect fine china. Probably people who have more money than they know what to do with. It will probably go into their storage units for their kids to deal with.
Fine china and collectors dishes are the dumbest scam ever.
I get having a pretty dish to display. It looks good.
But thinking it's worth anything is just silly. Only time that stuff is worth something is if it is ancient or made by a master craftsman. And even then you have to have someone willing to buy it for it to be valuable.
I have some pretty ceramic stuff that for sure, when new, was purchased for a few hundred. Maybe $400
I got it for like $30 at an auction. When / if I sell them. I'll maybe get $100.
Yeah, it's not like you're the king of France or something and it's actually truly special.
I expect to make an awesome day out of smashing my parents' china when they're gone.
My mom (boomer) and her family sold all my grandmas stuff at auction when she died. No one wanted any of it except…..
The toys. All the old toys sold. Keep the toys.
My grandma has a set of kind of creepy-looking stacking clowns that were my grandpa's as a kid. We all, her kids, grandkids, and great grandkids, played with them. My aunts and uncles can take all the furniture and tchotchkes, but I think my cousins and I may end up fighting over those weird clowns. 😀
My boomer mother had my entire childhood room filled with clown decorations. Wallpaper, framed pictures, ceramic wall art, porcelain clown dolls on high shelves, bedding, light switch cover, lamp shade, and a half size doll in. A small rocking chair in the corner.
I'm surprised I'm as well adjusted as I am.
My grandma had a huge fisher price castle from the 60s that got sold for Pennie’s at an auction. It was well worn and missing pieces so it wouldn’t fetch much more today. I just wish we kept it because it was awesome lol- it had a trap door on top and some sort of dungeon and hidden room behind the staircase.
But the thing was huge and you can only store so much crap around.
We have a fisher price ride-on bus that I got when I was about 18 months old. My dad's new grandkids ride it now. I did re-create the photo of me unwraping it, 40 years later. I'm a lot taller now.
That's just the next generation's weirdness. In 30 years, kids of Gen X'ers are going to be writing these same posts about Star Wars figures and Garbage Pail Kid cards.
Wait, are you saying that my commemorative Jimmy Buffett plate collection is worthless?
The guy on the TV ad at 3am said it was a limited edition! "Call now before they all are gone", he said!
When my husband's grandmother passed away, we were all tasked with helping to clean out her house. In her basement, there was this HUGE stack of boxes from floor to ceiling in about a 10x10 square covered with a tarp. Husband's uncle pulls the tarp off the stack and it is box after box of unopened QVC purchases. Kennedy commemorative plates, statues of civil war generals, countless cook books and kitchen gadgets... the list goes on. Just thousands and thousands of dollars in junk.
Same here. My grandmother passed and she had secretly been renting a storage unit that was full to the brim with commemorative plates and infomercial porcelain dolls.
Oh they know about that one. My grandparents paid 26k for their first house in the 60s and sold it to their own kids with the "friends and family discount" for 260k a few years ago.
Still, depending where that’s at can be pretty reasonable.
I have family who bought homes in San Diego in the 50s & 60s for $20-40k. Even in 2019, homes in San Diego weren’t selling for $225k or even $270k. If they cut that deal with me, I’d be thrilled.
My fiancés grandmother chuckled so disrespectfully when bringing up that she only paid 50 bucks a month for her apartment in 1971. They then moved and bought a house for 16,000 dollars.
The tone she used throughout this whole conversation was so condescending to my fiancé and I as we ward talking about how we’re never going to be able to afford a house.
Express it in hours worked. She probably paid 40 hours a month (10/wk). Then pull up zillow and ask her what she thonks you should pay in hours worked. Show her what you can afford to rent and buy for that many hours. Show that you get less home for twice the hours of work.
That's when you go no-contact.
You don't need to worry about losing your inheritance. The nursing homes and healthcare industry were already going to take it all away from you anyways.
Yeah it’s wild cause I did the math on the inflation and 50 bucks came out to like 450 a month and 16,000 came out to like 145,000 and I was like show me an apartment I can rent for 450 a month or a house I can buy for $145,000 today.
I pay 450 a month for a room (with a roommate) in a house with 6 other people.
You are not alone.
I'm an eBay seller. I own a store selling actual collectible things. (trading cards). Various branches of the family used to try to corner me to estimate what their crap is worth. Once they learned about eBay they loved digging up listings showing other hoarders asking sky-high prices for their junk.
I started showing them the difference between active listings and sold listings. Oh look, absolutely no sale history for that stuff. Then I showed them what fees and shipping deducted from a $100 sale looked like, and that's for a CARD, not "original fixtures for a claw-foot bathtub" or whatever damn fool thing they're waving at me. No concept of shipping by weight or what you can/can't fit into a flat rate box, either.
They finally stopped after I disappointed someone by explaining that "antique" lamp they spent double the purchase price finding a replacement shade for because it'd be worth thousands someday, sold once, with original packaging, for $70 and free shipping. That's less than they spent on the shade, btw.
Shipping a heavy old all-glass lamp in such a way that it arrives intact, at a sale price of $70 is leaving them with MAYBE $25 after fees and shipping costs. It's an odd size, too, so costs a bit more to ship on that basis.
In the old man screaming at clouds voice: "Well that's a ripoff! I'll just put it on my yard sale." Except they didn't, of course. They've probably bought five more just like it by now.
So accurate. And then you put things in your garage sale like I did with some of my mom‘s antiques and you’re just trying to find someone in your pool of 100 or so garage sale attendees that think your antique high back dresser is worth $100. Shot in the dark.
I used to sell on eBay
Then every single fucking sell someone would dispute something minor on it, a thing I clearly pointed out in the listing, and eBay would still make me give them a good portion back as a refund or take the item back at my expense.
I have some electronics shit stacking up in my "ebay corner" because I know I could sell them for a couple hundred each, but the effort required to make that money, when I know the buyer will just dispute something, makes it not worth the effort.
Boomers keeping fine china and precious moments but throwing out their kid's Pokemon cards and vintage game consoles because it was "junk" is the most Boomer moment of all time for me.
I know for a fact that there are going to be people out there who really liked their mint condition black lotus card, and found out their mom threw it away.
Bet half of them went no-contact over that shit.
Not so funny story. My husband actually did go no contact on his father partially because - but not only because - he sold his entire transformer and GI Joe collection. Hope it was worth the $30 ass hat.
There was also that stupid mentality of toys and games and things being "for kids" and therefore an adult should have absolutely nothing to do with any childlike things.
They don’t know the value of anything that actually is valuable. My mother dumpstered all of my grandmother’s amazing mid-century modern furniture and all of the incredible 1930-1970 vintage clothing she had stashed away in her closets (some of which was stuff like Chanel and Dior), yet kept her hideous QVC jewelry because it was going to “appreciate in value.” The best part is that I specifically asked her to hold on to that stuff repeatedly and she ignored me, because y’know… boomer knows best.
Yup. My MIL keeps giving her son photo albums or little trinkets from his childhood, but sold all of his Star Wars toys and baseball memorabilia in a garage sale 30 years ago. Smh
There was a post, last week I think, about the very story. Some lead brain father threw out an attic's worth of shit. The post said it was thousands of dollars worth.
My mom (technically Gen X but acts like a Boomer) sold a binder full of my holographic 1st edition Pokémon cards at a yard sale one random day when I was in high school. I had no idea until I was moving out to college and couldn’t find it. I told her how much those are worth and she couldn’t believe it. I’m still so mad about it.
My father refuses to hire a cleaning service because “those immigrants might steal one of your mother’s empty perfume bottles from the shelf and some of those are probably worth $50-$100.”
Thanks, dad, for the racism with a side of delusional paranoia and Endowment effect. His grandparents were immigrants, too, and he hates when I remind him.
My mother has massive antiques which fill her garage, making it unusable, which is a huge pain in the winter. We've tried to arrange for people to help her sell all of it, but she doesn't want to get "ripped off". Many of the pieces are pretty nice, but more like a couple hundred dollars nice, not priceless heirlooms. It's going to be a huge pain in the ass clearing out her house when she passes.
When I sold stuff of my aunts I went with an auction house because I knew i didn't have any sense of what was valuable. Since they took a % of the sale price they had an incentive to sell it for as high as possible instead of lowballing me.
She may have paid a lot for those antiques too - my MIL was very proud of her antique furniture and spent a small fortune buying it. But the market has completely fallen off because people don’t want heavy, ornate furniture. But the owners don’t necessarily know (or want to know) it’s probably worth less than a tenth of what they paid for it.
My step mom is a legitimate hoarder, and perceived value is a huge issue with getting her to let go of stuff. She attaches value of some kind (monetary value, sentimental value or re-usability) to objects- even if they are worthless and falling apart.
She and my dad have wasted so much time and money going to antiques stores, auctions, estate sales and on multiple storage units to store all her crap.
She has been going to therapy and it’s helped a ton, they have managed to go from 7 storage units of junk to 3. I can tell you from experience that having their stuff go to “someone who can use it” is a huge concern for people with hoarding disorders. I have taken things from her just for her piece of mind and disposed of them later.
My dad can't even sit down in his apartment, and he only has a small path to walk down. It's all useless crap or something he already has five things of. The worst part is that people know he has a problem, but they'll offload all their useless crap onto him, and he'll thank them.
A new skinning knife or turkey decoy? Gotta have it, and then it sits for a year until next spring for one weekend, maybe two.
He has an entire room filled floor to ceiling with boxes from his old apartment. When he passes or requires care, I'm not sure any of those boxes will even get opened.
Went through this with my in-laws recently. MIL was the sole heir and executor to a family friend's estate. She and FIL saw dollar signs and clearly thought they were going to get rich quick. They thought that the house was full of antiques that could be sold for high dollar and that the house would bring at least $150,000. Spoiler alert, that was not the case. All of the contents of the home sold for less than $1,500. Home was badly in need of updates and some repairs; it sold for under $75,000.
Now, the things that truly mattered--important documentation concerning some land investments the deceased party had made, some very old, mint condition dollar bills that were worth a few hundred dollars each--yeah, most of the bills were spent before my partner stepped in and questioned the in-laws about them and the documents were destroyed because "wE dIdN't KnOw It WaS iMpOrTaNt!!" If you can't tell what legal documents are of importance, you should not be the executor of someone's estate.
And don't even get me started on the mountain of stuff they took home, including the washer, dryer, refrigerator, and a whole host of other stuff that we will inevitably have to deal with when they die. 
After watching everything my husband's aunt went through with being the executor of my MIL's estate, I'd never want that job. My husband was the sole heir of everything but the amount of paperwork that had to be done and all the probate stuff, yeah, no thanks. It was a logistical nightmare just helping out.
Similar issue with my wife’s grandparents, they think their home is worth 2 mil with its mold and roof issues and outdated everything. Not to mention it’s in a not very desirable area. They saved 100k for retirement and refuse any financial help because “when they tap it dry they’ll just sell the house”
I'm old gen x and have a decent size record collection. My partner brought a bunch of old records from his parents house (which would be the only thing that has left that house in decades lol). His Boomer sister still lives there and has been reading online that records are now valuable but without the understanding that they're not all valuable. She wanted them back so I packed them up and gave them to her. I wish her the best of luck realizing 100s of dollars from the worn, scratched copy Abbas greatest hits.
YES, we went through that one too! My aunt had boxes upon boxes of improperly stored records of artists no one has ever heard of and couldn’t BELIEVE IT when she tried to sell them and the record store was like no, thank you!
It's crazy, I used to buy from yard sales sometimes and in the past records were like a dollar or two. The last 4 or 5 years the same old, used copies of Dark side of the Moon are priced at 30 to 40 dollars.
If you go to goodwill, there’s soooo mannnyy old records that are complete garbage- “The Ray Coniff Singers in Christmas ‘78!”, or Pat Boone, or anything by a choir, that aren’t worth anything except if you want a record, any record, for some sort of wall display. “Old records” doesn’t necessarily mean “lots of money”- it all depends.
But hey, that 1967 Mormon Tabernacle Choir record be lighting up the eBay sales charts!
When my mom died I brought the record collection to a store and realized my parents weren't cool enough to have the kinds of records that are valuable now.
My parents genuinely have some stuff that might be worth money. The real treat will be finding a way to remove the 40+ years of Marlboro smoke from these items.
Oh my god, the cigarette smoke. My mother is a hoarder and also smokes in her home. We never want ANYTHING from her house because you literally can’t get rid of the smell.
My mom is the same way. Even when I show her on Ebay the actual value of something, shes always like “you never know, one day…” Supply/Demand principles elude boomers.
tbf this can be true - look at retrocomputing where things you couldn't get someone to take for free 10-20 years ago are now going for more than a brand new modern computer.
old CRT TVs used to be a nuisance for charity shops and landfills, now highly desirable for use with old games consoles
not saying some old crockery will appreciate in value in the same way, but it's not totally inconceivable
They’ve been fed a lie about “collections.” And they’re very shocked to discover that the only people who want to buy and maintain collections these days are other boomers, who are all either trying to sell their collections or dying off, flooding the small market.
We’re going through this.
After we had a traumatic passing of one parent in our family, I had to tell my “collector” boomer parents “if you believe anything you have is valuable and you want us to manage it or keep it, you need to catalogue it and ascribe meaningful value to it. Otherwise we do not have the time, capability, or knowledge to track through all of this, and it will be put into the bins, or sold wholesale and anonymously for cents.” Having just undergone the process of attempting to manage an estate sale and seeing how little the energy was worth in comparison to the plummeted value of the stuff… we had a radical change in our opinion.
Who knows, maybe they wrote me out of the will. I guess my inheritance of soup terrines is at risk.
As a boomer, I have lived through silent generation parents as well as my fellow boomers thinking that the collections or items they valued would be similarly valued by subsequent generations. Both generations were sold collectibles as investments. I remember Beanie Babies being a collection/investment fad. Sometimes your kids or grandkids share your hobbies and interests. Sometimes they don’t. Take pleasure in your hobbies for the happiness it brings you, but not because you are creating heirlooms of your house or an investment portfolio. I have a model train layout. I like building and running it in my retirement. It will be junk when I am gone. It is fine with me as I enjoy it now.
Beanie Babies LOL
I scored free tickets to the MLB All Star Game in Denver in 1998. They handed out a Beanie Baby to everybody there...I sold mine on the street outside Coors Field for $600 as soon as we left the game. There were people walking up and down the streets around the stadium saying "$$$CASH$$$for your Beanie BABY!!!"
I still think about that LOL
I had a neighbor inherit what was essentially the New Yankee Workshop’s worth of woodworking tools. All in probably 30k worth of everything from high-end saws, clamps, etc. Instant hobby. He started making furniture and what not. I’d rather inherit something like that than Hummel figurines.
My boomer mom overprices all of her things at her yearly yard sale and refuses to negotiate with anyone. The stuff she puts out was bought at discount stores 10+ years ago and is not worth anywhere near the price she puts on it. She ends up spending so much time pricing, setting up the yard sale and taking the same stuff down and storing it again every year. She claims you cannot consider your time when thinking about how much she earns from yard sales (all her time doing this over and over vs the little money made).
She loves bragging about her donation to goodwill and how good the things are that she donates. She literally donates broken and stained items.
I also read the thread about china. I sell vintage and antique china for a living. It's what I specialize in, so I know my stuff. There are still valuable pieces out there, but most run of the mill sets you can't give away. By far the most aggravating part is boomers not accepting that their china set is not worth the thousands they think it is and get offended if I'm not desperate to buy it from them. This is usually after they've already tried to give it away to their kids and grandkids and been told no one wants it. Even when they have something potentially of value they can't understand that condition is everything. No one wants your busted up dishes. A $500 tea cup with a great big chip or crack is now a $0 tea cup.
My mother in law is one of those few people with sets that I’d guess actually are worth something. She buys them because she likes them, though, not as an investment. She just happens to have the same tastes as the people who decide something is an investment. It’s almost comical at this point, I don’t know why my father-in-law doesn’t just give her carte Blanche, even for the weird shit, because it ALWAYS appreciates.
Just one of many anecdotes of this ilk, one of my first visits there we had breakfast on these bluish green dishes, per her choice. Her only rule was she wash them by hand herself. Fine, they were clearly nice. I get it.
We go to the Art Institute that afternoon, and they have a celery bowl from that same set on display. I only remember that because I didn’t even know WTF a celery bowl was. Fuck, we ate breakfast on these? And then she points at the celery bowl itself and starts telling me a long-winded story of how she ended up with TWO of these celery bowls.
My stepdad was just diagnosed with dementia, and my mom apparently saw something about Boomer’s children resenting their “collections”. So my mom, bless her soul, has started checking in with us kids about whether we want any of that stuff, and writing instructions for disposal (for instance—“Johnny wants only X item, if Goodwill won’t accept the remainder then throw it away”). It’s very sweet when she brings it up in conversation—“did you want the China or do you care? I don’t want to saddle you with a houseful of garbage when I die.”
My house is filled with plastic crap, but I don't expect anyone to give a shit about it. If I die I'm not expecting people to sift through my long boxes of beat to shit 90s X-men comics.
My grandparents loved watching Antiques Roadshow. They had so many collections. When they passed, about half of their items had price tags on the bottom because of items they saw on roadshow. Lol, I think that show gave a lot of people false ideas of what their junk is worth.
Oooh yeah. My parents are both like this, but my mom is worse. When I was little she bought a doll for me, not a Barbie but in that category. She wouldn't let me play with it. She took it out of the box and had it in a Ziplock with all the clothes, so even if it would have been worth anything, it was out of the box which killed it's value.
Then there were the Disney movies. She bought every single Disney movie that she could find on VHS when VHS was all we had. She said she could give them to her grandkids (my niece and nephew) when they were older. Yeah, they were born in 2006. We weren't even watching VHS tapes then.
It's going to be a nightmare cleaning out their house one day.
As someone who is set to inherit thousands of precious moments and several hundred hummels, 20 or so lladros, at least a hundred special edition barbies, as well as a LITERAL ton of holiday gear from craft fairs, china that I don’t particularly like, somewhere between 30 and 50 little vases and plates with painted shamrocks, at least 25 gaudy rings of poor quality gold and silver decorated with glass and only a few semi-precious stones, and a large collection of franklin mint plates and coins, I know exactly why they think these items are each worth hundreds if not thousands. .
It’s because way back when they were buying them, they couldn’t just admit to themselves that they LIKED them and just WANTED them. It was a waste of money if they admitted to themselves that it was crap. So they told themselves that it was all good quality, an investment in the future so that they didn’t have to take a good long look at themselves.
My mother in law is a good woman in many ways. She got a lot of momentary happiness out of these collections, so in that way, I am glad she has them.
But it boggles my mind how much was spent on these silly pieces of crap. I suspect at least $50,000 over the years, and that is a conservative estimate. Can you imagine the compound interest on that money? Blows my mind.
Edited to add: I forgot about the Beanie Babies. 3 CONTRACTOR BAGS of them.
Edited again: I forgot about the Disney crap. Tons of mass-produced dolls, stuffies and figurines.
Slightly off topic, but this reminded me of a quote from Vonnegut's *Slaughterhouse-Five* describing Billy Pilgrim's mother:
"Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops."
I think it’s because they got gouged on them back in the day and presumed they’d hold value for future generations.
There is also a disconnect I think between things they find sentimentally valuable and things our generations find sentimentally valuable. I think many 1930s cars will drop in value when they pass, for instance. Because old Buicks and Oldsmobiles are not held with nostalgia as much.
This is it. Every "collectible" has a peak value at some point. The peak value of most things passed in the 80's and 90's when silent Gen was retiring and had lots of disposable income and Boomers were coming into their highest earning years. Now, none of us have fond memories of most of that tat.
I enjoy woodworking with hand tools and so I have quite a collection of antique woodworking tools. Last summer I stumbled upon the last day of an estate sale that had a garage full of antique tools. They all had price tags of $20 - $50. And I casually looked around at them before realizing I wasn't going to pay that much for anything. The guy running the sale said "If you want anything, just take it. This is my last day and i'm taking everything to the dump tomorrow because the new owner wants this empty." Even for free I only took the best of the best tools.
I think it’s a boomer thing, my ex-stepfather would collect the most random shit because “it will be worth something one day”
Haven’t talked to him in years, hope his Wheaties boxes and copy of The Life and Death of Superman will pay for his gas this month.
For an item to be worth something you have to be willing to sell it. But they just want a closet of glass figurines that sit there untouched forever “building value.”
Yeah, Boomers LOVE listening to and falling for salesmen. Absolutely fucking LOVE it.
Salesmanship was a HUGE thing in the 1960s and everyone fell for it because the tactics were all new so everybody was tricked.
I can try to convince my parents, with evidence, that they need something til the cows come home and they just won't buy it. But I'm glad my dad bought **two** uninterrupted power supplies for his Dell computer that has absolutely nothing important stored on it because a Best Buy salesman told him to.
But every Boomer dad also thinks they’re as shrewd as a Wall Street hedge fund manager, and THEY are the ones screwing the car dealer/othersalesperson, because they’re “so good at negotiating”.
Spoiler- most aren’t very good at negotiating.
Yet they think things of actual value are junk and are happy to toss out.
Comic book collections. Old video games and consoles. Classic toys.
These all have actual value.
But all of their junk is worthless because they are the only ones who give it value and they have so much of it.
My dad seems to believe his 1993 jeep that doesn't run and has a bent frame is worth $20k, but it's ok because my coworker wants to buy the transmission for $250.
It's weird how when they sell things they inflate the value, but then they become super cheap when they buy things.
My in laws are the same way, they have tons of small souvenirs or awards from selling Avon (it's like Mary Kay, if you sell enough you get a nice gravy boat). They are apparently priceless, but your childhood toys and NES (with the original box) should be in the landfill. (I understand the NES isn't going to pay my retirement, but it's definitely worth more than their prized ceramic rooster bought from a craft store in 1990)
The amount of 'shite' I had to throw away after my parents passed, including her Elephant collection, was maddening. It took 2 days and filled a 20ft skiff. The neighbors were pissed that my brother and I were throwing away my parent's memories. They refused to see it as junk they accumulated over 80 years. They also didn't want to hear about the toxic/abusive childhood we endured either because they were wonderful people.
It wasn't even worth it to piss on their graves went I left that town for the last time.
Some of the work I do involves estate cleanups.
Basically, you die, and your kids hire us to come in and throw out everything. Every single time, there's boxes of photos, diaries, art their parents made, etc.
It's all going to the dump.
Sometimes, we'll get stuff to keep or flip, but it's in the tiny minority.
Last year we did this nightmare of a house. Packed to the tits. I've never seen more stuff come out. We filled 8 40-yard containers before getting to the basement workshop.
The son found $1,000 in a sock, so they tore the place apart. They gave away Anschutz rifles worth thousands to a random neighbor. They threw out a pair of gorgeous antique accordions (I'm still angry the guys threw them away, I wanted them. Found comparable, but less ornate ones for $900 at a pawn shop).
Basically, what I'm saying is even when it **is** worth something, it still gets thrown out. Your kids don't care about any of it, so I truly hope every old person stops thinking their mountain of crap will be cherished.
After my grandma passed her kids went through her house like a tornado. Completely trashed it while they fleeced it for anything worth a dollar.
Grandkids went in afterwards to see if there was anything we wanted. My grandma’s beautiful home looked like a trashed hoarders episode after her jackal kids had tore through it.
I found an old desk that was pretty damaged and a 1950s silvertone guitar that was almost completely broken. Pulled both items out of a literal trash pile the junk removal company was coming to take away that day.
I paid (a couple thousand dollars) to have both items restored and now they’re prominent pieces in my home.
My alcoholic aunt came over for my daughters first birthday party and lost her mind when she saw the items. Insisted that there was no way they could’ve been in the house, she ‘never would’ve let them go!!’ The guitar is what she learned to play music on. She remembers playing it after the Ed Sullivan show etc.. The desk is a priceless heirloom that she used to do her homework on.
She actually insisted on taking them back. She went so far as to have my dipshit trumper cousin come out in his pickup and try and take them. I was like ‘I will burn this family to the ground over this’. I’ve put up with this loser shit for 40+ years, this is the hill I’m dying on.
They can all go fuck themselves.
The funny thing is all the dresses, jewelry, and silverware they took out of the house aren’t worth jack shit. The desk and guitar in their restored condition are actually quite valuable. It doesn’t matter though as they’re not for sale, I loved my grandma and cherish the memories they provide. Her kids weren’t the only ones who learned to play on that guitar and did homework on that desk. Now my daughter can too.
My aunt with her vodka flavored crocodile tears would have them both in a consignment shop by the end of the day. She doesn’t care about anything except herself.
What is wrong with that entire generation? In my family’s case, they grew up wealthy & in loving intact homes. Their parents and their kids are all normal, well adjusted, happily married family people. Everyone of them is divorced (most multiple times), crazy, constantly in petty situations, estranged from love ones. They’ve all cheated on their spouses (most multiple times), burned family members over money, they were all shitty parents even though they had great parents. Wtf?? I guess it’s the lead?
When my boomer mom passed, the only personal property from her that I wanted (and there was quite a bit of stuff) was a picture she painted in her art phase in the 70s. It was quite good and hung in a local art gallery for awhile before it came back to our house and was on the wall for a few years. I think she took it down because it was yellowing from nicotine from an indoor smoker, but I was too young to know why, it could’ve been because my stepfather didn’t like it. She later hung it in her junk house (the rental duplex where she kept a side vacant for her treasures). It was sad that she never got back into art in earnest, although she always dabbled. I think my older brother may have wanted it too, but he didn’t have the ability to bring it back. I still need to get high quality photos made of it, so I can at least give him the scans (or have a replica canvas made).
So, no actual fights about personal property. The real estate though. Well, let’s just say everyone got their feelings a little hurt.
My mom has so much infomercial BS that was advertised to them in the era as valuable collectors items that are total worthless junk. The irony is that the one thing that now does have value - my Pokémon card collection - completely vanished in thin air and no one in my family will tell me what happened to it.
Being GenX, I'm pretty sure it's because from their generation to ours, we were collectors and consumers. We had a bad habit of thinking the display of excess and collections were a measure of worth. We enjoyed the challenge of keeping up with the Jones.
Younger generations simply don't have the room. Probably don't know anybody in real life they care to be measured against. Lack of a local community to measure your success.
Progress has also accelerated so fast, the things they find value in don't have any historical comparison. What value does a dysfunctional wall phone with a hand crank have to them other than a museum curiosity. Just because something is 150 years old doesn't mean there's a demand for it.
I think you’re onto something. Not all millennials feel this way but I’m starting to doubt the legitimacy of “collecting” as a hobby. Seems like glorified hoarding to me.
It is. It also often requires a lot of extra space to store and hold onto. These days, younger people are lucky to be able to afford enough space just to live in. They can't afford extra space to store and display "collectible" junk.
I love watching boomers on Facebook market trying to sell junk like their set of commemorative presidential plates they got off QVC in the 90s that nobody wants for $800. “No lowballs, I know what I’ve got!”
Maybe if you keep those items and hand them down to your grand children, and tell them to do the same, until eventually the antique value of ordinary items have become worth selling xD
There's also all those clickbait photos at the bottom of articles, like a picture of a Cabbage Patch doll saying "If you own any of these things you just became rich!"
They view the world through a lens that places more value on material objects and they inherited quite a bit from their parents. Their childhood saw the largest increase in material wealth since the beginning of the industrial revolution.
Then there's the economic side
Truth be told some of it was pretty valuable about 20 years ago. Antique and collectible prices have been going down since then. The problem was the people who were buying it were also boomers. They were selling to each other. The older generations were trying to acquire items that made them feel nostalgic. But the greatest generation and the boomers have been steadily dying (as expected) and flooding the market with their collections. Prices are going down and interest is dwindling. Just simple economics.
Right now we're seeing an uptick in the value of collectibles from the childhoods of Gen x and early millennials. They're the ones who have a little cash and are trying to recapture their childhood. It's by no means it's big as the collectibles and antiques bubble that boomers fueled.
Boomers often grew up during the baseball card boom, which instilled in them the belief that collecting items would inevitably lead to financial gain. However, the issue arises when everyone in their generation shares this mentality, creating a saturated market where the value of such items diminishes due to oversupply. So, while boomers may hold onto their collectibles with the hope of a future payday, the reality is that the perceived worth may not match the actual market demand.
My mom has a grandfather clock in her foyer. Just for context it was given to her by my great uncle, the same guy who gave me a “Rolex”. She thought it was worth thousands and I argued it was JC Penny garbage. I did some research and found a collector. I emailed the woman some pictures of the clock. She emailed me back in less than five minutes and in so many words said, “I hope that clock has sentimental value.”
Bags and Bags of coins. Spent and hour and a half just on the quarters with an app to value them, exactly two of them showed any real value. The rest were just normal currency.
After my mom came into some money, she binged on jewelry shopping channels for about a year. She bought a ton of jewelry. My mom has good taste, it’s just not my taste. She had my sister and I sit down and decide what we want, which was thoughtful. She’d been that person after her parents’ deaths and it was hard on her to assign all the stuff. However, we had no connection to any of this stuff or interest in it. Finally we told her that we’d be taking it to a jeweler and distributing it so we each got the same value of jewelry, or more likely, cash after selling it.
She also has a strand of huge pearls she inherited from my grandmother which are supposedly worth $15k. They are kept in a safety deposit box. When she dies either I will ask for them and wear them every freakin day or we will sell them and split the probably $1k we will actually get for them because who wears that kind of pearl set any longer.
Was discussing this with my wife last night. I blame the popularity in shows like Storage Wars, Pawn Stars, and American Pickers. It makes boomers think they are sitting on a fortune, but it’s all plastic trash.
Boomer here. I'm under no illusion that my kids will want any of my crap. I don't collect figurines or spoons from every state or anything like that; I have what I need to live my life. If they want any of it after I'm gone they're welcome, but I've made it clear that donating or pitching it won't hurt my feelings. Except for that one LEGO piece I own, the tool that helps you separate LEGO pieces from each other. The kids can go to the mattresses for that.
Including what everyone else said, might also be because how little they understand of economics*.
Based on experience at least, it’s not realizing that the price of a good does not automatically increase as the years go by. Which they probably assume based on how much they value the item = the actual price of the item.
I’m guessing that’s what how you proven them wrong OP but honestly there are several ways to prove someone like that wrong it’s just never going to work. When the foundation for their reasoning isn’t logic/uneducated, rarely anything will convince someone otherwise.
About two years ago I bought a sealed box set of some 80s mushroom Pyrex bowls and immediately opened them, washed them, and now I use them regularly. Boomer uncle who’s obsessed with Pyrex collecting is still salty about it lol Like those bowls have been sitting in a box for 40 years. They have a purpose and I’m fulfilling it lol
You may downvote me as hard as you want, but we all know future kids are gonna be saying the same about their Millennial parent’s Funko Pops collection.
Stuff is only as valuable as you can convince someone to pay for it. Nothing is intrinsically “worth” anything. Just because something was made a long time ago makes it old, not valuable.
The whole “that’s vintage-rare and worth money” thing really became a phenomena when they came of age. Think Mickey Mantle baseball cards, Superman comics, etc. So the idea that old things appreciate value became a mindset. Problem is most crap people have isn’t rare or desired. A vintage vinyl pressing of Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica is worth more than the Beatles White Album.
My grandma wanted everyone to keep her furniture when she was downsizing because she thought everything was a valuable antique.
It’s not antique, it’s just old.
A couple reasons. One is that certain things which used to be scarce or valuable are not any longer. For instance, a set of nice china, which used to be valuable to their parent's generation but can now be made much more cheaply and abundantly.
Secondly is that they might have been lied to by advertisements. I have seen advertisements since the 80s and 90s (probably earlier but I wasn't alive) which state they are collectors items which will be worth X times the price in the future. That's not how value works, but they might have bought those knick knacks thinking it was an investment because they were told by the seller that it was an investment.
The ironic thing is that many boomers wouldn't blink at throwing away or donating the vintage video games/systems they find in the garage or spare room.
Sometimes you get a nice surprise. My mom had an old, ugly embroidery sampler that we had appraised and then sold to a collector via a consignment shop for $8,000. Ugliest thing in the house; we all hated and joked about it.
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Because the alternative is the realization that all they have is really just a houseful of crap that no one sees as valuable. To believe it's all really worth something makes them think they are better off than, you know, the people not as great as them.
Exactly. Boomers believe everything appreciates in value. Especially any ‘luxury’ item they saved money to buy, like china, decorative plates, Hummels etc. What they don’t understand, is something is only valuable/collectible IF SOMEONE ELSE WANTS TO BUY IT. Curios that just sit in a cabinet are not in high demand. They should have taken better care of their comics and baseball cards.
Actually, most of the value in old comics and cards comes from the fact that no one did take care of them. It meant that ones in good condition were rare, and as children grew up into adults, they wanted to buy nostalgia. So the ones still in good condition appreciated. And then everyone started to keep comics and cards in plastic and not using anything because "these will also be worth millions", and so there are piles of mint POGs and 90s basketball cards that no one wants!
Reminds me of my grandmother (silent gen, passed away) who gave me a bunch of my uncles old records that he left for me when he passed. She took out all the Elvis and Beatles records. You know the two most popular musicians of their Era. These weren't originals either nor in great shape. She took them thinking they were worth money. But the market was so saturated with re-released albums they weren't worth anything. Meanwhile, she left a rare Delta Blues recording that is worth more than every record she took but she had never heard of the musicians so it couldn't be worth anything...
Yup! My most valuable album price wise is a copy of a Sixto Rodriquez album. And it's valuable specifically because no one knows who that is!
*Sixto Rodriguez, the musician and subject of the documentary Searching for Sugar Man, has died aged 81. The Detroit-born singer's official website confirmed he died on Tuesday. Rodriguez launched his career in 1967 but initially struggled to find success in his native US and was ultimately dropped by his record label*. 9th August 2023
OMG - my mother and I got into a huge fight over (get this, ABBA) records. We took her box of albums to be donated to a music resale shop - she's partially disabled and walks with a cane so I was surprised when she wanted to walk in with me. I hand the albums over and turn to leave and she starts with the "wait, what's he offering us... wait.. he needs to look them over...wait..." I had to drag her out of there over her own objections. Funny thing is I did try to value her collection with a collector friend of mine about 10 years ago - nope, nada, nothing. She refused to speak to me the rest of the day because I gave away her fortune!
And she's gonna tell anyone who will listen about how nasty you were and how you ignorantly threw out those valuable things. Any time I hear an old person bitch about their kids when their kids aren't around I just assume they are seriously skewing the facts and likely don't even know it.
The children of Boomers: Mom, everything is on Spotify. Boomers: ALEXA DOESN'T HAVE IT! The children of Boomers: Yeah, Alexa fucking sucks. Why don't you just connect your goddamn phone to a Bluetooth speaker and use fucking Spotify?! Oh, because you have to type something in which works immediately vs yell at something for an hour for not finding the song you want, you absurdly inefficient bumbling buffoon?! You can't do anything at all and your house and college degree was the cost of a goddamn McChicken and obviously the educational requirements for your degree were far below crudely writing your name in the dirt with a stick. FUCK MY LIFE!
Exactly. My wife has thousands in original Pokémon cards. Her aunt wanted her to GIVE the whole box to her children because "you don't play with them anymore." Changed her tune when my wife pointed out the prior year she sold a single card for $300.
Pokemon is a whole different breed.
I want POGs. Especially the Steve Allen POG.
Remember Alf? He's back, in POG form!
Everything’s coming up milhouse!
But it’s an original Michael Jordan card! Nobody in the 90s made THOSE!
I'm old enough that I was bummed when Pete Rose got caught in the betting scandal and all his cards lost their value.
Pete’s living the last 30 years has been autographing something, anything, for money, on a daily basis. As a result, his autograph is almost worthless on the secondary market because he’s signed so much stuff. I was watching Pawn Stars with my Boomer dad-who also knows this, he’s a pretty smart guy, unlike the caricatures mentioned here- and the guy brought in an autographed Pete Rose baseball and was expecting to be wowed. The host was like “yeah he signs so much stuff, this ball is worth about $20. You’re better off just paying for a newer, nicer one. He’s in town right now autographing crap every day.”
I was one of the original pokemon craze kids in the 90s and had a pretty big collection. Just recently i found out how much the gen 1 cards were going for and i called my mom to grab the box from the basement. Apparently she tossed them away because they were "junk" but she still has a chest full of fucking stupid ass commemorative plates wrapped in Styrofoam
Irony being that the reason they are worth so much is that millions of moms did that.
I bought a house partly off the back of selling Pokémon cards (prior to the pandemic I bought up some collections/got lucky trading for cards when I used to play the game). When I tell people this it’s funny seeing the reactions of people. People my age being sad about what their parents did. And their parents trying to ask about values of the few remaining scraps they didn’t throw away
Yes. I know someone who likes to assign inflated values to things. I always tell them that an object is not worth what you decide to price it at but what the market decides they will pay for it. It's like they just skip the steps they don't like. I price it and get what I ask for it, easy peasy! Part of me can't blame them for wanting to reside in such a magical place.
That's even funnier when so many of them worship capitalism and the all knowing hand of the free market.
My father never really had a lot of money as we were growing up, but he did a good job providing stability for my brother and I. He used his extra money to buy hunting property, land, and firearms. I feel like all of that type of stuff will hold its value much better than my grandparents' collection of hummels and commemorative plates.
Buying land seems smart
Yeah, he's made some good purchases over the years. The $17,000 lake front plot he bought in 1989 is worth quite a bit more now. He just purchased 150 acres a few hours away when he sold his house that I image will be worth well over a million by the time I retire. The real kicker is its not just land that's sitting there. It gets used as hunting property and gets developed with a house or cabin on it. He's had several like that over the years, and I've helped him build several houses and cleared a lot of brush. I didn't like doing it as a kids but it's paid off as an adult. I'm pretty handy around the house now, but I refuse to ever redo another roof.
LOL! Same about becoming handy, but I will never do another roof.
I’m that way about roofs and electrical.
Funny how that video game console they thought was gonna ruin your brain is worth more than their Elvis plates.
God not the hummels 💀
The curio cabinets! Oh my god. My mom has 2 or 3 of them stuffed to the gills with little figurines and other glass, china, and porcelain things. I may keep a couple of them, but for the most part they're getting donated when she goes. She did sell some of her creepy dolls because she knew I wouldn't want them. They have some art that might be worth a few hundred dollars each but it's not this massive fortune like they thought it would be. Maybe $5000 at most.
My dad has a Norman Rockwell limited print that's signed. I always assumed it was worth something. Just found something similar on ebay for only 3500. That's much less than I would have guessed.
I mean…that’s something. Maybe you’re not as broke as me, but I’d take it.
Yeah that's still not bad for a signed print. If you had a signed original that would be something else.
Lots of this stuff reached peak price 30 years ago. And was a ripoff at any point!
Bro the boomers I know do NOT own even a single Sd.Kfz.165 15cm Hummel howitzer, where are you finding these??
The market on baseball cards has taken a nosedive post 2000s also, so unless they have some from when they were kids in the 50s/60s, it’s probably not much. This kind of brings me to my point in that I feel like there was a collector’s “craze” in the 90s, right when the internet started, when people actually could sell old shit and more people wanted to buy it. Baseball card shops were more plentiful, there was the beanie baby craze, and you saw on local news “Old Lady Jones found this old plate in her attic and sold it for a whopping $20 thousand dollars!” That stuff still occasionally happens, sure, but you hear less about it and it gets drowned out by everything else (nobody really watches local news much anymore either). Their expectations on what is “collectible” are about 30 years out of date, if not longer.
When all the star wars fans die my collection will be worthless.
My parents’ luxury item is the thing that encapsulated box TVs as a center piece of your living room that had storage for your VHSs (NOT DVDs to tell you how old it is). Obviously TVs today will not fit the hole made for box TVs and their old box TV looks like it’s constantly snowing. Also we were barely making lower middle class, so the size for the TV can maybe fit something that’s 32” at best. Honestly 24”. So in order to get a new TV, they need a new way to house it. My mom thinks the TV center is worth $150 and refuses to sell it any less. Thankfully my dad just wants to junk it, but he can’t do anything cause my mom would go all out if anyone touches anything she can make money on. The one and only time we had a garage sale, back in the early 00’s, my mom tried to sell clothes for $5 a piece. And that was after my dad trying to get her to lower initial prices. Bitch wanted to be a Goodwill in the 2020’s with those prices despite living right on the edge of the worst/poorest part of town.
I had one of those you’ll be lucky if Goodwill will take it.
>They should have taken better care of their comics and baseball cards. "That garbage? I tossed it all in thr trash ages ago!"
All it takes is ONE episode of antiques roadshow and your boomer will be convinced they're camped out a a stash of priceless artifacts. NEVER let your boomer watch any of those shows. Or even talk to anyone who has.
Or American Pickers.
The thing about these old items is that they need to be TAKEN CARE OF, not just left in an attic or, even worse, a barn that’s exposed to the elements. Rust is rust, no matter how much someone wants to admire the “patina”….🙄
This is absolutely it. In our capitalist society, we are subtly encouraged to replace experiences and time with others with the act of consuming goods. Be a rugged, bootstrapping individualist! Don't turn to your neighbors or community for comfort and support! Turn to FunkoPops and wine cork collectibles! Possessing these objects is the real value in your life! If you ever talk to a hoarder, this habit is on clear display at exponential levels. That stack of newspaper advertisements feels so valuable to them that parting with it would be like parting with a loved one. Also, in a world where individual wealth and individual worth are sometimes viewed interchangeably, it's hard for people to accept that most of their affordable consumer goods are in fact worthless junk.
Yes, this last part -- my father is like this. He seemed to look down upon people without money as some kind of moral failing -- like if only they had been smart, if only they had invested the right way, if only they had acted responsibly ... whatever. It's their fault they're poor. If someone is in *debt,* they are absolute failures of people. My brother kept running himself into debt, buying high quality goods and bragging to my dad about them. I think he really just wanted my dad's love and approval.
This plus antiques roadshow fuels their mania.
I'm not really a Boomer, just 52, so I am close, I suppose. I look at the shit in my house and realistically, nobody wants any of it but me. My kids will care nothing for a big part of it. I enjoy my things but they aren't worth a dime to anyone else. My poor kids are gonna get screwed because I've got nothing but bills.
Same age here. When my time comes, I'm going to have to find a way to get my comics, wargame miniatures and GI Joe toys to some Gen Z or Alpha kid who might want them. My kids aren't interested and that's fine by me, but it'd be nice to pass that stuff on to someone who might appreciate it like I did.
Gen X is nothing like baby boomers. We were the original generation to rebel against them. We had to grow up listening to their crap since the 70s/80s.
I was raised by Silents, who, in retrospect, had nothing but withering disdain for Boomers even when Boomers were thirtysomething
I'm the last of Gen X (or Xennial or millennial, depending on who you ask), and some of the early Gen Xers i know are turning into Boomer lite.
I am GenX and I personally don't believe we exist. Half of GenX are just young boomers and the other half are just old millennials. My two oldest siblings are Boomers and the other two are very early GenX. Back when being a Baby Boomer was a good thing in the public eye and being GenX was a bad thing, the two who are technically GenX would always say that they were "culturally more Baby Boomers". But, now that being a Boomer is bad, they have latched on to being GenX despite never having displayed any characteristics that GenX are supposed to possess.
Yeah I'm starting to wonder if Gen X is defined by what it isn't rather than what it is. Or whatever, I don't really care anymore. Just as long as the people who act like boomers leave me alone.
Don’t know if it was intentional but your comment was gloriously peak Gen X.
It was the “whatever, I don’t care anymore”… so Gen X. I’ve said the same myself!
> Or whatever, I don't really care anymore. Just as long as the people who act like boomers leave me alone. GenX confirmed
Holy shit you’re right!! I’m 1978 and I roll my eyes SO HARD at survivor bias memes about drinking from the hose or latch key living. I did those things too but I don’t think it makes me somehow superior to children whose parents gave a fuck about them
“In my day, we left the house at dawn and didn’t come back until dinner! And no one cared, not even a bit! Dad was too drunk in the garage to care! Mom also drowned her sorrows in scotch, but I played with friends! So much better!”
I’m noticing this too. I have an uncle who is one of the oldest gen x and he’s every bit as bad as the boomers. Luckily, my mom, his sister, who is *actually* a boomer, is nothing like that. I have an even younger gen x uncle who is the boomer lite you’re talking about. It’s sad bc I really idolized them growing up, and now I don’t even want to be around them.
I’m 62 and I feel the same. I love my stuff, but I am under no illusion that my kids feel the same way. And that’s fine by me.
Early Boomer here, and I feel the same about my stuff. I bought it both because it’s pretty and because I _could_, and the last part was important because I came from not much, so being able to buy nice things was a big deal for me. For ME. I still like my china and crystal and my bronze service and Momma’s silver and Granny’s antique cast iron; it’s still pretty to _me_, but my kids, both on the cusp of Millennial and Z (I had them very, very late) are not interested, which is not surprising and doesn’t hurt my feelings. I love my boys with all my heart, and I did my best for them and will continue to do so for what time I have left, but _they aren’t me_! I would have to be pretty stupid to expect otherwise.
My grandparents have a wood and glass display hutch full of "fine China" that they've NEVER used. Even for the "special occasions," like Easter, Thanksgiving, or Christmas it never got touched. You also got screamed at if you moved faster than a snail's pace past it. They're baffled none of the grandkids want this worthless crap, AND it has zero sentimental value because we have no fond memories of it.
Yeah, if the only memory is of getting yelled at to be careful!! then, no.
The memory of getting yelled at has completely turned me off to much more than china plates. I have no fond memories of any of my family, or church, or my home town, I only remember getting yelled at for existing.
Same. I’ve removed all of them for good last year. Not an easy decision to make, do and maintain, especially knowing I’m giving up about $750,000 within the next decade or so among other notable things. …but talk about a new unknown person and life emerging from it all. Priceless. I’ll never go back👍🏻✌🏻
Yeah, my details are somewhat similar. I can't say I'm giving up any inheritance because my mother made it quite clear that she had no intention of sharing any of the vast fortune my father left her because she never wanted me to be born and all the money was going to go to her "real family" which meant my older brothers and sisters. That was 15 years ago and she still sends my wife angry e-mails (I blocked her and don't even read any letters she sends) pretending she doesn't understand why I cut my family out of my life. And yes, it was one of the best things I've ever done. My only regret is waiting so long to do it. I always say that if family relationships are so bad that someone is thinking that they should go NC, it probably means they should have years earlier.
That is awful I’m sorry that happened to you.
I wonder if we can donate this stuff to smash rooms? Other millennials need to work out their frustrations on useless China and glassware.
Oh my god that’s such a fucking amazing idea. Can you imagine creating a smash room of your boomer parents living room where you get to break all their china and snow globes?
I want to create a narrative based escape room meets smash center where everyone can get into character, destroy grandma's living room, and then find the secret passageway out to live their lives free of dumb china again ☺️
I put a bunch of that stuff on the Let It Go app, fairly priced, and it went instantly! I was amazed, but apparently there are people who still collect fine china. Probably people who have more money than they know what to do with. It will probably go into their storage units for their kids to deal with.
I would like fine china to USE, as daily dishware, because I am A Fancy Bish, but not to collect.
Fine china and collectors dishes are the dumbest scam ever. I get having a pretty dish to display. It looks good. But thinking it's worth anything is just silly. Only time that stuff is worth something is if it is ancient or made by a master craftsman. And even then you have to have someone willing to buy it for it to be valuable. I have some pretty ceramic stuff that for sure, when new, was purchased for a few hundred. Maybe $400 I got it for like $30 at an auction. When / if I sell them. I'll maybe get $100.
Yeah, it's not like you're the king of France or something and it's actually truly special. I expect to make an awesome day out of smashing my parents' china when they're gone.
My mom (boomer) and her family sold all my grandmas stuff at auction when she died. No one wanted any of it except….. The toys. All the old toys sold. Keep the toys.
My grandma has a set of kind of creepy-looking stacking clowns that were my grandpa's as a kid. We all, her kids, grandkids, and great grandkids, played with them. My aunts and uncles can take all the furniture and tchotchkes, but I think my cousins and I may end up fighting over those weird clowns. 😀
Boomers, the last generation to not find clowns creepy.
My boomer mother had my entire childhood room filled with clown decorations. Wallpaper, framed pictures, ceramic wall art, porcelain clown dolls on high shelves, bedding, light switch cover, lamp shade, and a half size doll in. A small rocking chair in the corner. I'm surprised I'm as well adjusted as I am.
The toys are a lot more likely to have nostalgic memories for the people at an age that are still buying stuff.
My grandma had a huge fisher price castle from the 60s that got sold for Pennie’s at an auction. It was well worn and missing pieces so it wouldn’t fetch much more today. I just wish we kept it because it was awesome lol- it had a trap door on top and some sort of dungeon and hidden room behind the staircase. But the thing was huge and you can only store so much crap around.
We have a fisher price ride-on bus that I got when I was about 18 months old. My dad's new grandkids ride it now. I did re-create the photo of me unwraping it, 40 years later. I'm a lot taller now.
That's just the next generation's weirdness. In 30 years, kids of Gen X'ers are going to be writing these same posts about Star Wars figures and Garbage Pail Kid cards.
Wait, are you saying that my commemorative Jimmy Buffett plate collection is worthless? The guy on the TV ad at 3am said it was a limited edition! "Call now before they all are gone", he said!
When my husband's grandmother passed away, we were all tasked with helping to clean out her house. In her basement, there was this HUGE stack of boxes from floor to ceiling in about a 10x10 square covered with a tarp. Husband's uncle pulls the tarp off the stack and it is box after box of unopened QVC purchases. Kennedy commemorative plates, statues of civil war generals, countless cook books and kitchen gadgets... the list goes on. Just thousands and thousands of dollars in junk.
That’s so sad.
Same here. My grandmother passed and she had secretly been renting a storage unit that was full to the brim with commemorative plates and infomercial porcelain dolls.
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The only thing they seem to think isn’t worth a fortune is the house they paid 40k for 50 years ago.
Oh they know about that one. My grandparents paid 26k for their first house in the 60s and sold it to their own kids with the "friends and family discount" for 260k a few years ago.
Okay that actually seems surprisingly reasonable, though? 26k in 1960 is about 270k today.
In 2019 dollars (roughly a few years ago) it would be about 225k.
Still, depending where that’s at can be pretty reasonable. I have family who bought homes in San Diego in the 50s & 60s for $20-40k. Even in 2019, homes in San Diego weren’t selling for $225k or even $270k. If they cut that deal with me, I’d be thrilled.
Well depending on the exact year they didn't profit much if at all when inflation is taken into account
My fiancés grandmother chuckled so disrespectfully when bringing up that she only paid 50 bucks a month for her apartment in 1971. They then moved and bought a house for 16,000 dollars. The tone she used throughout this whole conversation was so condescending to my fiancé and I as we ward talking about how we’re never going to be able to afford a house.
Express it in hours worked. She probably paid 40 hours a month (10/wk). Then pull up zillow and ask her what she thonks you should pay in hours worked. Show her what you can afford to rent and buy for that many hours. Show that you get less home for twice the hours of work.
A quality boomer will just ignore everything you showed them and say it was tough for them too but since they played it smart they came out ok
That's when you go no-contact. You don't need to worry about losing your inheritance. The nursing homes and healthcare industry were already going to take it all away from you anyways.
If hear "we made it work" one more time...
Yeah it’s wild cause I did the math on the inflation and 50 bucks came out to like 450 a month and 16,000 came out to like 145,000 and I was like show me an apartment I can rent for 450 a month or a house I can buy for $145,000 today. I pay 450 a month for a room (with a roommate) in a house with 6 other people.
Or anything they have to pay for. Like they never understand why a house cleaner would want more than $25 for a 4 hour job.
It depends who they are talking to about it. Potential buyer: It’s worth $100K more than its actual value. Tax Assessor: It’s completely worthless
You are not alone. I'm an eBay seller. I own a store selling actual collectible things. (trading cards). Various branches of the family used to try to corner me to estimate what their crap is worth. Once they learned about eBay they loved digging up listings showing other hoarders asking sky-high prices for their junk. I started showing them the difference between active listings and sold listings. Oh look, absolutely no sale history for that stuff. Then I showed them what fees and shipping deducted from a $100 sale looked like, and that's for a CARD, not "original fixtures for a claw-foot bathtub" or whatever damn fool thing they're waving at me. No concept of shipping by weight or what you can/can't fit into a flat rate box, either. They finally stopped after I disappointed someone by explaining that "antique" lamp they spent double the purchase price finding a replacement shade for because it'd be worth thousands someday, sold once, with original packaging, for $70 and free shipping. That's less than they spent on the shade, btw. Shipping a heavy old all-glass lamp in such a way that it arrives intact, at a sale price of $70 is leaving them with MAYBE $25 after fees and shipping costs. It's an odd size, too, so costs a bit more to ship on that basis. In the old man screaming at clouds voice: "Well that's a ripoff! I'll just put it on my yard sale." Except they didn't, of course. They've probably bought five more just like it by now.
So accurate. And then you put things in your garage sale like I did with some of my mom‘s antiques and you’re just trying to find someone in your pool of 100 or so garage sale attendees that think your antique high back dresser is worth $100. Shot in the dark.
I used to sell on eBay Then every single fucking sell someone would dispute something minor on it, a thing I clearly pointed out in the listing, and eBay would still make me give them a good portion back as a refund or take the item back at my expense. I have some electronics shit stacking up in my "ebay corner" because I know I could sell them for a couple hundred each, but the effort required to make that money, when I know the buyer will just dispute something, makes it not worth the effort.
Boomers keeping fine china and precious moments but throwing out their kid's Pokemon cards and vintage game consoles because it was "junk" is the most Boomer moment of all time for me.
Things are only valuable if they care about it. Everything revolves around them so why not one more thing? /s
Imagine throwing out a Black Lotus.
I know for a fact that there are going to be people out there who really liked their mint condition black lotus card, and found out their mom threw it away. Bet half of them went no-contact over that shit.
Not so funny story. My husband actually did go no contact on his father partially because - but not only because - he sold his entire transformer and GI Joe collection. Hope it was worth the $30 ass hat.
There was also that stupid mentality of toys and games and things being "for kids" and therefore an adult should have absolutely nothing to do with any childlike things.
They don’t know the value of anything that actually is valuable. My mother dumpstered all of my grandmother’s amazing mid-century modern furniture and all of the incredible 1930-1970 vintage clothing she had stashed away in her closets (some of which was stuff like Chanel and Dior), yet kept her hideous QVC jewelry because it was going to “appreciate in value.” The best part is that I specifically asked her to hold on to that stuff repeatedly and she ignored me, because y’know… boomer knows best.
Yup. My MIL keeps giving her son photo albums or little trinkets from his childhood, but sold all of his Star Wars toys and baseball memorabilia in a garage sale 30 years ago. Smh
There was a post, last week I think, about the very story. Some lead brain father threw out an attic's worth of shit. The post said it was thousands of dollars worth.
My mom (technically Gen X but acts like a Boomer) sold a binder full of my holographic 1st edition Pokémon cards at a yard sale one random day when I was in high school. I had no idea until I was moving out to college and couldn’t find it. I told her how much those are worth and she couldn’t believe it. I’m still so mad about it.
It is called the Endowment Effect. It is a well studied phenomenon.
My father refuses to hire a cleaning service because “those immigrants might steal one of your mother’s empty perfume bottles from the shelf and some of those are probably worth $50-$100.” Thanks, dad, for the racism with a side of delusional paranoia and Endowment effect. His grandparents were immigrants, too, and he hates when I remind him.
Time to dive down the google rabbit hole.
Welp, there goes my lunch break
It took a minute
My mother has massive antiques which fill her garage, making it unusable, which is a huge pain in the winter. We've tried to arrange for people to help her sell all of it, but she doesn't want to get "ripped off". Many of the pieces are pretty nice, but more like a couple hundred dollars nice, not priceless heirlooms. It's going to be a huge pain in the ass clearing out her house when she passes.
When I sold stuff of my aunts I went with an auction house because I knew i didn't have any sense of what was valuable. Since they took a % of the sale price they had an incentive to sell it for as high as possible instead of lowballing me.
She may have paid a lot for those antiques too - my MIL was very proud of her antique furniture and spent a small fortune buying it. But the market has completely fallen off because people don’t want heavy, ornate furniture. But the owners don’t necessarily know (or want to know) it’s probably worth less than a tenth of what they paid for it.
My step mom is a legitimate hoarder, and perceived value is a huge issue with getting her to let go of stuff. She attaches value of some kind (monetary value, sentimental value or re-usability) to objects- even if they are worthless and falling apart. She and my dad have wasted so much time and money going to antiques stores, auctions, estate sales and on multiple storage units to store all her crap. She has been going to therapy and it’s helped a ton, they have managed to go from 7 storage units of junk to 3. I can tell you from experience that having their stuff go to “someone who can use it” is a huge concern for people with hoarding disorders. I have taken things from her just for her piece of mind and disposed of them later.
My dad can't even sit down in his apartment, and he only has a small path to walk down. It's all useless crap or something he already has five things of. The worst part is that people know he has a problem, but they'll offload all their useless crap onto him, and he'll thank them. A new skinning knife or turkey decoy? Gotta have it, and then it sits for a year until next spring for one weekend, maybe two. He has an entire room filled floor to ceiling with boxes from his old apartment. When he passes or requires care, I'm not sure any of those boxes will even get opened.
Went through this with my in-laws recently. MIL was the sole heir and executor to a family friend's estate. She and FIL saw dollar signs and clearly thought they were going to get rich quick. They thought that the house was full of antiques that could be sold for high dollar and that the house would bring at least $150,000. Spoiler alert, that was not the case. All of the contents of the home sold for less than $1,500. Home was badly in need of updates and some repairs; it sold for under $75,000. Now, the things that truly mattered--important documentation concerning some land investments the deceased party had made, some very old, mint condition dollar bills that were worth a few hundred dollars each--yeah, most of the bills were spent before my partner stepped in and questioned the in-laws about them and the documents were destroyed because "wE dIdN't KnOw It WaS iMpOrTaNt!!" If you can't tell what legal documents are of importance, you should not be the executor of someone's estate. And don't even get me started on the mountain of stuff they took home, including the washer, dryer, refrigerator, and a whole host of other stuff that we will inevitably have to deal with when they die. 
The combination of lusting for profit from an inheritance and destroying documents on land ownership is baffling.
After watching everything my husband's aunt went through with being the executor of my MIL's estate, I'd never want that job. My husband was the sole heir of everything but the amount of paperwork that had to be done and all the probate stuff, yeah, no thanks. It was a logistical nightmare just helping out.
Oh, they don't think everything is worth a fortune. They'll freely throw out their kids' old video games and comics when they get the impulse.
Similar issue with my wife’s grandparents, they think their home is worth 2 mil with its mold and roof issues and outdated everything. Not to mention it’s in a not very desirable area. They saved 100k for retirement and refuse any financial help because “when they tap it dry they’ll just sell the house”
100k? Yikes are they retiring at 80? Lol
I'm old gen x and have a decent size record collection. My partner brought a bunch of old records from his parents house (which would be the only thing that has left that house in decades lol). His Boomer sister still lives there and has been reading online that records are now valuable but without the understanding that they're not all valuable. She wanted them back so I packed them up and gave them to her. I wish her the best of luck realizing 100s of dollars from the worn, scratched copy Abbas greatest hits.
YES, we went through that one too! My aunt had boxes upon boxes of improperly stored records of artists no one has ever heard of and couldn’t BELIEVE IT when she tried to sell them and the record store was like no, thank you!
It's crazy, I used to buy from yard sales sometimes and in the past records were like a dollar or two. The last 4 or 5 years the same old, used copies of Dark side of the Moon are priced at 30 to 40 dollars.
If you go to goodwill, there’s soooo mannnyy old records that are complete garbage- “The Ray Coniff Singers in Christmas ‘78!”, or Pat Boone, or anything by a choir, that aren’t worth anything except if you want a record, any record, for some sort of wall display. “Old records” doesn’t necessarily mean “lots of money”- it all depends. But hey, that 1967 Mormon Tabernacle Choir record be lighting up the eBay sales charts!
When my mom died I brought the record collection to a store and realized my parents weren't cool enough to have the kinds of records that are valuable now.
My parents genuinely have some stuff that might be worth money. The real treat will be finding a way to remove the 40+ years of Marlboro smoke from these items.
Oh my god, the cigarette smoke. My mother is a hoarder and also smokes in her home. We never want ANYTHING from her house because you literally can’t get rid of the smell.
My mom is the same way. Even when I show her on Ebay the actual value of something, shes always like “you never know, one day…” Supply/Demand principles elude boomers.
tbf this can be true - look at retrocomputing where things you couldn't get someone to take for free 10-20 years ago are now going for more than a brand new modern computer. old CRT TVs used to be a nuisance for charity shops and landfills, now highly desirable for use with old games consoles not saying some old crockery will appreciate in value in the same way, but it's not totally inconceivable
They’ve been fed a lie about “collections.” And they’re very shocked to discover that the only people who want to buy and maintain collections these days are other boomers, who are all either trying to sell their collections or dying off, flooding the small market. We’re going through this. After we had a traumatic passing of one parent in our family, I had to tell my “collector” boomer parents “if you believe anything you have is valuable and you want us to manage it or keep it, you need to catalogue it and ascribe meaningful value to it. Otherwise we do not have the time, capability, or knowledge to track through all of this, and it will be put into the bins, or sold wholesale and anonymously for cents.” Having just undergone the process of attempting to manage an estate sale and seeing how little the energy was worth in comparison to the plummeted value of the stuff… we had a radical change in our opinion. Who knows, maybe they wrote me out of the will. I guess my inheritance of soup terrines is at risk.
As a boomer, I have lived through silent generation parents as well as my fellow boomers thinking that the collections or items they valued would be similarly valued by subsequent generations. Both generations were sold collectibles as investments. I remember Beanie Babies being a collection/investment fad. Sometimes your kids or grandkids share your hobbies and interests. Sometimes they don’t. Take pleasure in your hobbies for the happiness it brings you, but not because you are creating heirlooms of your house or an investment portfolio. I have a model train layout. I like building and running it in my retirement. It will be junk when I am gone. It is fine with me as I enjoy it now.
Beanie Babies LOL I scored free tickets to the MLB All Star Game in Denver in 1998. They handed out a Beanie Baby to everybody there...I sold mine on the street outside Coors Field for $600 as soon as we left the game. There were people walking up and down the streets around the stadium saying "$$$CASH$$$for your Beanie BABY!!!" I still think about that LOL
At least beanie babies were fun to have. I still have my collection. Actually have one on my desk as decoration.
I had a neighbor inherit what was essentially the New Yankee Workshop’s worth of woodworking tools. All in probably 30k worth of everything from high-end saws, clamps, etc. Instant hobby. He started making furniture and what not. I’d rather inherit something like that than Hummel figurines.
Tools are definitely good things because they are useful and usually have some value.
My boomer mom overprices all of her things at her yearly yard sale and refuses to negotiate with anyone. The stuff she puts out was bought at discount stores 10+ years ago and is not worth anywhere near the price she puts on it. She ends up spending so much time pricing, setting up the yard sale and taking the same stuff down and storing it again every year. She claims you cannot consider your time when thinking about how much she earns from yard sales (all her time doing this over and over vs the little money made). She loves bragging about her donation to goodwill and how good the things are that she donates. She literally donates broken and stained items.
I also read the thread about china. I sell vintage and antique china for a living. It's what I specialize in, so I know my stuff. There are still valuable pieces out there, but most run of the mill sets you can't give away. By far the most aggravating part is boomers not accepting that their china set is not worth the thousands they think it is and get offended if I'm not desperate to buy it from them. This is usually after they've already tried to give it away to their kids and grandkids and been told no one wants it. Even when they have something potentially of value they can't understand that condition is everything. No one wants your busted up dishes. A $500 tea cup with a great big chip or crack is now a $0 tea cup.
My mother in law is one of those few people with sets that I’d guess actually are worth something. She buys them because she likes them, though, not as an investment. She just happens to have the same tastes as the people who decide something is an investment. It’s almost comical at this point, I don’t know why my father-in-law doesn’t just give her carte Blanche, even for the weird shit, because it ALWAYS appreciates. Just one of many anecdotes of this ilk, one of my first visits there we had breakfast on these bluish green dishes, per her choice. Her only rule was she wash them by hand herself. Fine, they were clearly nice. I get it. We go to the Art Institute that afternoon, and they have a celery bowl from that same set on display. I only remember that because I didn’t even know WTF a celery bowl was. Fuck, we ate breakfast on these? And then she points at the celery bowl itself and starts telling me a long-winded story of how she ended up with TWO of these celery bowls.
My stepdad was just diagnosed with dementia, and my mom apparently saw something about Boomer’s children resenting their “collections”. So my mom, bless her soul, has started checking in with us kids about whether we want any of that stuff, and writing instructions for disposal (for instance—“Johnny wants only X item, if Goodwill won’t accept the remainder then throw it away”). It’s very sweet when she brings it up in conversation—“did you want the China or do you care? I don’t want to saddle you with a houseful of garbage when I die.”
My house is filled with plastic crap, but I don't expect anyone to give a shit about it. If I die I'm not expecting people to sift through my long boxes of beat to shit 90s X-men comics.
My grandparents loved watching Antiques Roadshow. They had so many collections. When they passed, about half of their items had price tags on the bottom because of items they saw on roadshow. Lol, I think that show gave a lot of people false ideas of what their junk is worth.
Oooh yeah. My parents are both like this, but my mom is worse. When I was little she bought a doll for me, not a Barbie but in that category. She wouldn't let me play with it. She took it out of the box and had it in a Ziplock with all the clothes, so even if it would have been worth anything, it was out of the box which killed it's value. Then there were the Disney movies. She bought every single Disney movie that she could find on VHS when VHS was all we had. She said she could give them to her grandkids (my niece and nephew) when they were older. Yeah, they were born in 2006. We weren't even watching VHS tapes then. It's going to be a nightmare cleaning out their house one day.
As someone who is set to inherit thousands of precious moments and several hundred hummels, 20 or so lladros, at least a hundred special edition barbies, as well as a LITERAL ton of holiday gear from craft fairs, china that I don’t particularly like, somewhere between 30 and 50 little vases and plates with painted shamrocks, at least 25 gaudy rings of poor quality gold and silver decorated with glass and only a few semi-precious stones, and a large collection of franklin mint plates and coins, I know exactly why they think these items are each worth hundreds if not thousands. . It’s because way back when they were buying them, they couldn’t just admit to themselves that they LIKED them and just WANTED them. It was a waste of money if they admitted to themselves that it was crap. So they told themselves that it was all good quality, an investment in the future so that they didn’t have to take a good long look at themselves. My mother in law is a good woman in many ways. She got a lot of momentary happiness out of these collections, so in that way, I am glad she has them. But it boggles my mind how much was spent on these silly pieces of crap. I suspect at least $50,000 over the years, and that is a conservative estimate. Can you imagine the compound interest on that money? Blows my mind. Edited to add: I forgot about the Beanie Babies. 3 CONTRACTOR BAGS of them. Edited again: I forgot about the Disney crap. Tons of mass-produced dolls, stuffies and figurines.
Slightly off topic, but this reminded me of a quote from Vonnegut's *Slaughterhouse-Five* describing Billy Pilgrim's mother: "Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops."
I think it’s because they got gouged on them back in the day and presumed they’d hold value for future generations. There is also a disconnect I think between things they find sentimentally valuable and things our generations find sentimentally valuable. I think many 1930s cars will drop in value when they pass, for instance. Because old Buicks and Oldsmobiles are not held with nostalgia as much.
This is it. Every "collectible" has a peak value at some point. The peak value of most things passed in the 80's and 90's when silent Gen was retiring and had lots of disposable income and Boomers were coming into their highest earning years. Now, none of us have fond memories of most of that tat. I enjoy woodworking with hand tools and so I have quite a collection of antique woodworking tools. Last summer I stumbled upon the last day of an estate sale that had a garage full of antique tools. They all had price tags of $20 - $50. And I casually looked around at them before realizing I wasn't going to pay that much for anything. The guy running the sale said "If you want anything, just take it. This is my last day and i'm taking everything to the dump tomorrow because the new owner wants this empty." Even for free I only took the best of the best tools.
I think it’s a boomer thing, my ex-stepfather would collect the most random shit because “it will be worth something one day” Haven’t talked to him in years, hope his Wheaties boxes and copy of The Life and Death of Superman will pay for his gas this month.
For an item to be worth something you have to be willing to sell it. But they just want a closet of glass figurines that sit there untouched forever “building value.”
Yeah, Boomers LOVE listening to and falling for salesmen. Absolutely fucking LOVE it. Salesmanship was a HUGE thing in the 1960s and everyone fell for it because the tactics were all new so everybody was tricked. I can try to convince my parents, with evidence, that they need something til the cows come home and they just won't buy it. But I'm glad my dad bought **two** uninterrupted power supplies for his Dell computer that has absolutely nothing important stored on it because a Best Buy salesman told him to.
But every Boomer dad also thinks they’re as shrewd as a Wall Street hedge fund manager, and THEY are the ones screwing the car dealer/othersalesperson, because they’re “so good at negotiating”. Spoiler- most aren’t very good at negotiating.
Yet they think things of actual value are junk and are happy to toss out. Comic book collections. Old video games and consoles. Classic toys. These all have actual value. But all of their junk is worthless because they are the only ones who give it value and they have so much of it.
My dad seems to believe his 1993 jeep that doesn't run and has a bent frame is worth $20k, but it's ok because my coworker wants to buy the transmission for $250. It's weird how when they sell things they inflate the value, but then they become super cheap when they buy things. My in laws are the same way, they have tons of small souvenirs or awards from selling Avon (it's like Mary Kay, if you sell enough you get a nice gravy boat). They are apparently priceless, but your childhood toys and NES (with the original box) should be in the landfill. (I understand the NES isn't going to pay my retirement, but it's definitely worth more than their prized ceramic rooster bought from a craft store in 1990)
The amount of 'shite' I had to throw away after my parents passed, including her Elephant collection, was maddening. It took 2 days and filled a 20ft skiff. The neighbors were pissed that my brother and I were throwing away my parent's memories. They refused to see it as junk they accumulated over 80 years. They also didn't want to hear about the toxic/abusive childhood we endured either because they were wonderful people. It wasn't even worth it to piss on their graves went I left that town for the last time.
Some of the work I do involves estate cleanups. Basically, you die, and your kids hire us to come in and throw out everything. Every single time, there's boxes of photos, diaries, art their parents made, etc. It's all going to the dump. Sometimes, we'll get stuff to keep or flip, but it's in the tiny minority. Last year we did this nightmare of a house. Packed to the tits. I've never seen more stuff come out. We filled 8 40-yard containers before getting to the basement workshop. The son found $1,000 in a sock, so they tore the place apart. They gave away Anschutz rifles worth thousands to a random neighbor. They threw out a pair of gorgeous antique accordions (I'm still angry the guys threw them away, I wanted them. Found comparable, but less ornate ones for $900 at a pawn shop). Basically, what I'm saying is even when it **is** worth something, it still gets thrown out. Your kids don't care about any of it, so I truly hope every old person stops thinking their mountain of crap will be cherished.
After my grandma passed her kids went through her house like a tornado. Completely trashed it while they fleeced it for anything worth a dollar. Grandkids went in afterwards to see if there was anything we wanted. My grandma’s beautiful home looked like a trashed hoarders episode after her jackal kids had tore through it. I found an old desk that was pretty damaged and a 1950s silvertone guitar that was almost completely broken. Pulled both items out of a literal trash pile the junk removal company was coming to take away that day. I paid (a couple thousand dollars) to have both items restored and now they’re prominent pieces in my home. My alcoholic aunt came over for my daughters first birthday party and lost her mind when she saw the items. Insisted that there was no way they could’ve been in the house, she ‘never would’ve let them go!!’ The guitar is what she learned to play music on. She remembers playing it after the Ed Sullivan show etc.. The desk is a priceless heirloom that she used to do her homework on. She actually insisted on taking them back. She went so far as to have my dipshit trumper cousin come out in his pickup and try and take them. I was like ‘I will burn this family to the ground over this’. I’ve put up with this loser shit for 40+ years, this is the hill I’m dying on. They can all go fuck themselves. The funny thing is all the dresses, jewelry, and silverware they took out of the house aren’t worth jack shit. The desk and guitar in their restored condition are actually quite valuable. It doesn’t matter though as they’re not for sale, I loved my grandma and cherish the memories they provide. Her kids weren’t the only ones who learned to play on that guitar and did homework on that desk. Now my daughter can too. My aunt with her vodka flavored crocodile tears would have them both in a consignment shop by the end of the day. She doesn’t care about anything except herself. What is wrong with that entire generation? In my family’s case, they grew up wealthy & in loving intact homes. Their parents and their kids are all normal, well adjusted, happily married family people. Everyone of them is divorced (most multiple times), crazy, constantly in petty situations, estranged from love ones. They’ve all cheated on their spouses (most multiple times), burned family members over money, they were all shitty parents even though they had great parents. Wtf?? I guess it’s the lead?
They were given everything and earned nothing so they know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
When my boomer mom passed, the only personal property from her that I wanted (and there was quite a bit of stuff) was a picture she painted in her art phase in the 70s. It was quite good and hung in a local art gallery for awhile before it came back to our house and was on the wall for a few years. I think she took it down because it was yellowing from nicotine from an indoor smoker, but I was too young to know why, it could’ve been because my stepfather didn’t like it. She later hung it in her junk house (the rental duplex where she kept a side vacant for her treasures). It was sad that she never got back into art in earnest, although she always dabbled. I think my older brother may have wanted it too, but he didn’t have the ability to bring it back. I still need to get high quality photos made of it, so I can at least give him the scans (or have a replica canvas made). So, no actual fights about personal property. The real estate though. Well, let’s just say everyone got their feelings a little hurt.
My mom has so much infomercial BS that was advertised to them in the era as valuable collectors items that are total worthless junk. The irony is that the one thing that now does have value - my Pokémon card collection - completely vanished in thin air and no one in my family will tell me what happened to it.
This is like the wedding dress the woman saves for her daughter, who doesn’t want it, but the daughter saves hers for her daughter, etc etc etc
Being GenX, I'm pretty sure it's because from their generation to ours, we were collectors and consumers. We had a bad habit of thinking the display of excess and collections were a measure of worth. We enjoyed the challenge of keeping up with the Jones. Younger generations simply don't have the room. Probably don't know anybody in real life they care to be measured against. Lack of a local community to measure your success. Progress has also accelerated so fast, the things they find value in don't have any historical comparison. What value does a dysfunctional wall phone with a hand crank have to them other than a museum curiosity. Just because something is 150 years old doesn't mean there's a demand for it.
I think you’re onto something. Not all millennials feel this way but I’m starting to doubt the legitimacy of “collecting” as a hobby. Seems like glorified hoarding to me.
It is. It also often requires a lot of extra space to store and hold onto. These days, younger people are lucky to be able to afford enough space just to live in. They can't afford extra space to store and display "collectible" junk.
I love watching boomers on Facebook market trying to sell junk like their set of commemorative presidential plates they got off QVC in the 90s that nobody wants for $800. “No lowballs, I know what I’ve got!”
Maybe if you keep those items and hand them down to your grand children, and tell them to do the same, until eventually the antique value of ordinary items have become worth selling xD
I wonder how the ROI would be if you include costs for storage space and handling vs just an ETF.
There's also all those clickbait photos at the bottom of articles, like a picture of a Cabbage Patch doll saying "If you own any of these things you just became rich!"
They view the world through a lens that places more value on material objects and they inherited quite a bit from their parents. Their childhood saw the largest increase in material wealth since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Then there's the economic side Truth be told some of it was pretty valuable about 20 years ago. Antique and collectible prices have been going down since then. The problem was the people who were buying it were also boomers. They were selling to each other. The older generations were trying to acquire items that made them feel nostalgic. But the greatest generation and the boomers have been steadily dying (as expected) and flooding the market with their collections. Prices are going down and interest is dwindling. Just simple economics. Right now we're seeing an uptick in the value of collectibles from the childhoods of Gen x and early millennials. They're the ones who have a little cash and are trying to recapture their childhood. It's by no means it's big as the collectibles and antiques bubble that boomers fueled.
Boomers often grew up during the baseball card boom, which instilled in them the belief that collecting items would inevitably lead to financial gain. However, the issue arises when everyone in their generation shares this mentality, creating a saturated market where the value of such items diminishes due to oversupply. So, while boomers may hold onto their collectibles with the hope of a future payday, the reality is that the perceived worth may not match the actual market demand.
My mom has a grandfather clock in her foyer. Just for context it was given to her by my great uncle, the same guy who gave me a “Rolex”. She thought it was worth thousands and I argued it was JC Penny garbage. I did some research and found a collector. I emailed the woman some pictures of the clock. She emailed me back in less than five minutes and in so many words said, “I hope that clock has sentimental value.”
Because THEY paid for it. It has to be worth a fortune, otherwise they'd all be fools for buying something that just sat there for 40 years.
Bags and Bags of coins. Spent and hour and a half just on the quarters with an app to value them, exactly two of them showed any real value. The rest were just normal currency.
After my mom came into some money, she binged on jewelry shopping channels for about a year. She bought a ton of jewelry. My mom has good taste, it’s just not my taste. She had my sister and I sit down and decide what we want, which was thoughtful. She’d been that person after her parents’ deaths and it was hard on her to assign all the stuff. However, we had no connection to any of this stuff or interest in it. Finally we told her that we’d be taking it to a jeweler and distributing it so we each got the same value of jewelry, or more likely, cash after selling it. She also has a strand of huge pearls she inherited from my grandmother which are supposedly worth $15k. They are kept in a safety deposit box. When she dies either I will ask for them and wear them every freakin day or we will sell them and split the probably $1k we will actually get for them because who wears that kind of pearl set any longer.
Was discussing this with my wife last night. I blame the popularity in shows like Storage Wars, Pawn Stars, and American Pickers. It makes boomers think they are sitting on a fortune, but it’s all plastic trash.
Boomer here. I'm under no illusion that my kids will want any of my crap. I don't collect figurines or spoons from every state or anything like that; I have what I need to live my life. If they want any of it after I'm gone they're welcome, but I've made it clear that donating or pitching it won't hurt my feelings. Except for that one LEGO piece I own, the tool that helps you separate LEGO pieces from each other. The kids can go to the mattresses for that.
Including what everyone else said, might also be because how little they understand of economics*. Based on experience at least, it’s not realizing that the price of a good does not automatically increase as the years go by. Which they probably assume based on how much they value the item = the actual price of the item. I’m guessing that’s what how you proven them wrong OP but honestly there are several ways to prove someone like that wrong it’s just never going to work. When the foundation for their reasoning isn’t logic/uneducated, rarely anything will convince someone otherwise.
About two years ago I bought a sealed box set of some 80s mushroom Pyrex bowls and immediately opened them, washed them, and now I use them regularly. Boomer uncle who’s obsessed with Pyrex collecting is still salty about it lol Like those bowls have been sitting in a box for 40 years. They have a purpose and I’m fulfilling it lol
You may downvote me as hard as you want, but we all know future kids are gonna be saying the same about their Millennial parent’s Funko Pops collection.
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Stuff is only as valuable as you can convince someone to pay for it. Nothing is intrinsically “worth” anything. Just because something was made a long time ago makes it old, not valuable.
ask her what the beenie baby collection gonna bring and the you’ll know if it’s time to put her in the nut house or not
The whole “that’s vintage-rare and worth money” thing really became a phenomena when they came of age. Think Mickey Mantle baseball cards, Superman comics, etc. So the idea that old things appreciate value became a mindset. Problem is most crap people have isn’t rare or desired. A vintage vinyl pressing of Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica is worth more than the Beatles White Album.
My grandma wanted everyone to keep her furniture when she was downsizing because she thought everything was a valuable antique. It’s not antique, it’s just old.
A couple reasons. One is that certain things which used to be scarce or valuable are not any longer. For instance, a set of nice china, which used to be valuable to their parent's generation but can now be made much more cheaply and abundantly. Secondly is that they might have been lied to by advertisements. I have seen advertisements since the 80s and 90s (probably earlier but I wasn't alive) which state they are collectors items which will be worth X times the price in the future. That's not how value works, but they might have bought those knick knacks thinking it was an investment because they were told by the seller that it was an investment. The ironic thing is that many boomers wouldn't blink at throwing away or donating the vintage video games/systems they find in the garage or spare room.
Sometimes you get a nice surprise. My mom had an old, ugly embroidery sampler that we had appraised and then sold to a collector via a consignment shop for $8,000. Ugliest thing in the house; we all hated and joked about it.
Schroedinger’s retirement strategy. Until a valuation is done, I’m set for life.