The Great Wealth Transfer has never felt more underway. Boomers who own more than half of owner-occupied housing in Britain are now grappling with the practicalities of downsizing. It is estimated that in the next 20 or 30 years, boomers will pass down between £5.5-7 trillion worth of assets and, according to Savills, around £2.9 trillion of which is held in property.
Boomers who are living in houses that they have been in for decades are looking to their millennial children to shoulder some of the burden of their boomer junk prompting much Swedish death cleaning and decluttering. This seems like a fair trade given that in many cases, these children stand to inherit their fortune and better still for them this is set to double by 2035.
Hat stands, granny’s dinner service, rocking horses and other odds and sods all need homes and no, they haven’t heard of Vinted or Facebook Marketplace. ‘Do you want this torch darling?’ shouts my mother thrusting a plastic red contraption with its rusty spring jumping out in my face. ‘And here are some valances for the children’s beds. You should really cover up a mattress darling, it looks frightful!’, she barks. ‘And what about this dress that I wore in 1972 to my coming out ball? Won’t Beatrice want to wear it some day? Tell her I was once a size 6 too!’. The bags of GCSE files, valances and torches just keep coming down the M4.
‘Don’t stop her,’ whispers my brother on a voice note from Los Angeles where he lives. ‘She’s not going to be able to downsize with all that rubbish in her house’ he instructs. ‘Let her bring it to you.’ After a load of old letters from my youth arrived I collapsed in an armchair reading them over Christmas with a large glass of damson gin. I promptly forgot about the incriminating evidence until my youngest child found a photo of me kissing someone. When he innocently announced that he has found a photo of Mummy kissing Daddy (it wasn’t Daddy) it darkens even the worst of January evenings.
Although Millennials in Britain are set to receive an ‘inheritance boom’ this will not be confined to assets – they’ll also inherit the Boomer clutter. Known as The Great Stuff Transfer, Millennials are faced with a considerable amount of junk that their Boomer parents have acquired over the years and are either too sentimental, frail or disincentivised to let go of. Hoarder disorder, therefore, can worsen with age. According to a survey by The British Heart Foundation those aged over 74 wait up to 33 months before discarding an item they no longer use.
Caroline Bell from Savills who has been selling homes for 35 years advises thus: ‘Start small. According to our latest client survey, more than half of downsizers have owned their home for over 20 years. If you are clearing a house that has been lived in for decades, the prospect may seem overwhelming. The important thing is to make a start somewhere, even if it’s just a single drawer. One thing leads to another.’
Indeed. A Panasonic stereo (missing its remote of course) was brought by my mother from the Cotswolds along with an old iron that looks as if it might spontaneously combust any moment. My brother’s hideous Argos chrome bed from the 1990s was even threatened but thankfully I managed to stop delivery of it in the nick of time. My old pine desk bought in Stroud circa 1992 will soon be winging its way to me along with the drawers all intact and untouched since 1998. In these drawers hold Royal Enclosure passes from 1997, a draft invitation I sent to my teen pin-up Paul Nicholls (of Eastenders fame) to my 16th birthday party and some ski passes from Val d’Isère.
The decluttering continues. The most recent visit brought floral flasks with no lids, a ballgown with pins all over it that turned out to be quite a painful exercise, several chipped cut crystal bowls and lots of packs of turquoise fishnet tights from New Look in Stroud. When I see my GCSE physics folder about to be thrown out, I am caught in a moment of both nostalgia and nausea. I remember whiling away the hours in our au pair’s kitchenette on the top floor of the house where I grew up teaching myself about positive and negative circuits. The only way I could crash through the boredom threshold was by speaking to myself as if I was the teacher, don’t ask me why.
It occurs to me that I need to engage in some emotional decluttering. Unsurprisingly, there’s no category for that on eBay.
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