The Boomer Burden: Dealing with
Your Parents' Lifetime Accumulation of Stuff,
by Julie Hall
Thomas Nelson Press, 2007
I must hand it to Julie Hall for addressing the very emotionally-charged subject of getting rid of a parent’s “things” when they pass away. Especially since she specifically addresses the generation of Baby Boomers whose parents grew up during the depression and, for one reason or another, accumulated belongings that have now become a burden on their surviving children.
In The Boomer Burden: Dealing with Your Parents’ Lifetime Accumulation of Stuff, Hall starts by talking about how the idea for the book came about. Hall is a professional estate contents expert and certified personal property appraiser who specializes in estate liquidation. After years of seeing the pain her clients went through in disposing of their parents’ things – both valuable and not – Hall realized that some sort of guide was needed to help the surviving children through the process.
Hall provides several anecdotes that, while not meant to scare the reader, should serve as a warning about how emotions can cause great rifts in families when they are under the stress of dividing a household’s belongings. Also, the stories serve as a caution against appraisers who may seem to be “helping” but who end up scamming the elderly into selling valuable antiques at flea market prices.
While The Boomer Burden is a valuable resource for people going through the process of disposing of a deceased relative’s belongings, it also is an inspiration for younger parents to avoid the pitfalls described in the book. For myself, the book inspired me to look around at all the “junk” I’ve let accumulate, as well as the shelves of unused items in the garage and cellar that were left by our home’s previous occupants.
I must admit that it took me a while to read this book because, after each chapter, I would go find five things to either post on Freecycle or sell on Craigslist. If you don’t know about these tools, I highly recommend seeking them out on the internet.
Even if you are not dealing with a relative’s belongings, merely thinking about how your own death will impact your family, this book is a very useful resource for providing tips on what you can do now to avoid the family-wrenching pitfalls Hall has seen over the years.
228 pp.
This is Hall’s first book.
