Ever since I went viral talking ad nauseam about the Thrifting Golden Age, I’ve been inundated with messages and comments, all asking the same thing: What do I do with all of my parents’ stuff?
A lot of us will be confronted with this question. Realtor.com projects that Boomers and the Silent Generation will give up roughly 13.9 million homes between 2026 and 2036. That’s millions of houses, each filled with a lifetime of furniture, photos, paperwork, and china, that someone will have to empty.
I know, because I’ve been there. When my grandmother died in 2019, I was completely overcome with grief. I was forgetful; I skipped meals; I was managing the fallout from her car accident and meeting with a funeral home, insurance companies, and police officers. And I was saddled with the same thing: what to do with every single item in her house (and, because she was renting, I had very little time to clear it out).
Those first few days, I remember vividly thinking, “We won’t get rid of anything.” Less than a week later, we had ordered a dumpster.
Anyone who’s familiar with me knows how important my grandmother was and is to me. But the sheer volume of things — clothes, art, furniture, photos, documents — felt impossible to sort through. And I am someone who sorts through things for a living!
When someone dies, there is also the issue of money. Even with Medicare, my grandmother’s death came with tens of thousands of dollars in hospital bills: the ambulance, the first hospital, the life flight, the trauma hospital. Then there are the funeral costs (the median funeral with burial was $8,300 in 2023, according to the National Funeral Directors Association).
So: How do you cull through a house full of stuff? How do you get money for some of it? What’s worth saving? What’s worth selling?
I’ve spent about a decade buying from estate sales and thrift stores and selling what I find. So this is the advice I’d give a friend, whether she’s clearing out her parents’ house or shopping someone else’s estate sale this weekend.
