How to deal with your parents’ personal belongings

Over the next couple of decades, an estimated US$90 trillion (S$115.8 trillion) in assets will be passed down from the Silent Generation and baby boomers to their Gen X and millennial heirs. But this so-called Great Wealth Transfer has a confounding corollary: Our parents haven’t just been accumulating money, they’ve also been accumulating stuff. So much stuff.

There’s silver flatware, antique wooden furniture, fine china, baseball cards, model trains, Hummel figurines, cut-crystal stemware, model trains, vintage clocks, the collections go on and on. And that’s before you get to family heirlooms, paper records and never-ending junk drawers.