Baby Boomers: Your kids don’t want your stuff

You saved all your life, acquiring all sorts of assets that you now want to leave to your children. Today, more and more Baby Boomers are finding that their kids just don’t want that antique auto or that original oil painting.

Too many of us fail to recognize that the Millennial generation has grown up with an entirely different view of the world, their possessions, one’s life style and even value system. This may come as a shock. It did to me. As readers may recall, my wife and I have been downsizing for three years now. During the course of this process, we have offered our 30-something daughter and her husband all sorts of stuff it turns out they didn’t want. From snowboards to unopened Tiffany wedding gifts, they politely and gently declined our largesse. This includes larger assets as well.

We have, for example, the luxury of owning two homes, a weekend place and another dwelling close to the office. Although my daughter loves to visit and has a real sentimental attachment to the “country” home, she really has no interest in inheriting the old homestead. 

“I just couldn’t afford the upkeep and maintenance,” she says. “It wouldn’t be feasible.”

If you haven’t had this discussion with your kids, maybe you should. I have learned that there is a major difference between how my generation (and my parents’ generation) spent their time, versus today’s Millennials, in the USA. Previous generations spent most of their lives in pursuit of stuff. We worked to acquire stuff and spent most of our time buying, collecting, storing and enjoying our possessions. Any spare time we had was devoted to maintaining and repairing these symbols of our success. Many of us prided ourselves on measuring our self-worth by how many possessions we acquired.

When asked why we needed two houses, four cars and 11 widescreen televisions, we answered, “Why, to leave to the kids and the grandchildren, of course.” We assumed our future generations would value, maintain and accumulate even more antique rugs, dining room sets, golf clubs, etc. Brother, it’s time to face the truth. They don’t want our junk, no matter how valuable we think it is.

For one thing, they don’t have room for it. I recently wrote a column on the growing trend by Millennials toward living in smaller houses, apartments and even trailers. My daughter has no room for my teakwood bookcase full of thousands of DVDs and CDs I have painstakingly collected through the years. She shakes her head quietly while grinning at me, wondering why in the world I still own those things when all of these media products can be easily and simply obtained on the Internet and stored/streamed through the Cloud.

In addition, most of our kids value mobility, adventure and experience far more than we did. Given the choice between spending $20,000 on a new car, or a three-week African vacation, most of them would choose Africa. The argument that the automobile would last years longer than that vacation doesn’t faze them in the least. 

To them, stuff has to have a purpose. It must be a means to an end, not the end itself. If something new accomplishes a purpose more efficiently, they dump the old and embrace the new. That may sound unsentimental or even ungrateful, but it isn’t. It’s just different.

My daughter still wants to keep certain objects that evoke memories of our past together. Usually, they are small and hardly the most valuable objects. But they are valuable to her and in the end, that’s what counts. As for the rest of that stuff, my advice is to sell it, give it away or dump it and spare your children that chore. 

Bill Schmick is registered as an investment adviser representative with Berkshire Money Management. Bill’s forecasts and opinions are purely his own. None of the information presented here should be construed as an endorsement of BMM or a solicitation to become a client of BMM. Email him at Bill@afewdollarsmore.com.