In order to keep him from tossing mementos, I told him to just leave it all. When the time comes I'll pick through stuff for a few keepsakes, donate the furniture, and dumpster the rest. Seems like it would just be easier that way in our situation.
+1
For some reason, folks tend to value dollars of "stuff" more than dollars of computer entries on brokerage or bank statements.......
In the years before my dad (a widower by then and living 10 hours away) passed, we talked about all the "stuff" in his house, much of it untouched since mom died. He was uncomfortable dealing with it. Between thinking things had some monetary value that they really didn't, getting sentimental and not really having the energy or interest, little got done. But, it turned out that it didn't really matter.
When he passed, DW and I had one week to wake and bury him, take what we wanted from the house and leave the remaining stuff and the house with a realtor to sell or dispose of. And we did it, not easily, but we did it.
We made arrangements at the funeral home and they took care of everything except tying my tie. We just had to show up, greet and shake hands, etc. We found a realtor who was willing to handle arranging for an auction house to sell the furniture, a disposal company to toss the rest and a handyman and cleaning service to prep the house for sale.
We drove down in my pickup truck and that defined the amount we could haul home. Of the six days we were actually down there, we spent two going through things, boxing as appropriate and loading the truck and one day running around town following dad's attorney's instructions for closing things down. (Note: we did visit dad 3 - 4 times a year and were generally familar with his things and his business.)
At the end, we figured a thorough prior de-cluttering and sales effort might have yielded, at most, $3k to $5k more than we eventually got. Of the various idiosyncrasies in the way dad ran his life, that was far from the top of the list of things not financially optimized! And it would have put him though a tedious chore he had no interest in at a time when the appropriate thing was for him to enjoy life surrounded by his "stuff."
More financially impactful were the discoveries of things like too much money in the zero-interest checking account some of which should have been in a short term CD, some tax filings where he needlessly paid too much, holding some stock losers which should have been sold long before, etc. But it seems we, like most others, fretted more over things like the auction house only getting us $50 for the couch that we think we could have sold for $150.
Looking back, I'm glad we didn't push him to declutter and sell. That amounted to a loss (opportunity cost actually) of maybe $3k to $5k and a few days hustling by DW and myself. But, so what?
