Prompted by the comments here and on Facebook to my previous posting about valuing things, I thought I would try to clarify a few things:
- I realize that my guesses about what things my children might value are imperfect. Some of the things I'm saving or passing on to them are things I think they ought to value, things I hope they will value eventually, even if they might not value them now. Family heirlooms, booklets of memories, etc. fall into this category.
- My daughter made the mistake of telling us they might have a yard sale with the things they don't want. That information could have made us more reluctant to pass things on to her, but in fact it had the opposite effect: if we thought an object might be of value to someone in a yard sale, off it went to my daughter.
- We haven't held a yard sale ourselves, nor have I listed anything other than our cat (FREE and LOVABLE! Please let me know if you want to adopt her!!) on Kijiji. In response to Ironman's question, I think the transaction costs of those types of disposal are just too high for us, especially since all the disposal, packing, moving, etc. must take place fairly quickly.
- We began by giving most of our yard equipment and supplies to some friends.
- Things we don't want, and that we think our children won't want (and won't likely want to try to sell themselves) are going to various charity shops. Some will take only clothing; others take household items as well. Also we've had pretty good luck disposing of large items by just leaving them on the curb (e.g. big sheets of foam insulation, a not-perfect coat tree, a couple of desk chairs with taped-up arms).
- Alex's problem, mentioned in his comment, is one that has plagued me over the years: "Whaddya mean nobody wants this computer? I paid over $2K for it!" etc. I think the only floppies we've saved are for the textbook I did many years ago. But we also shredded tonnes of them (let's hear it for tough shredders!). Also, we just put two keyboards, two portable tape recorders, etc. in the garbage. And even though I can't imagine anyone will want it, I put my super-duper expensive Panasonic portable CD player into a charity bag.
- I'm not at all keen on Rick's partner's solution. That solution implies a value of zero or less for all the items in both piles. Even with fairly high shadow prices for storage in the place we're moving to, there are some things I value enough that I'd like to keep them. Examples here include my old scrapbooks and photo albums, conductors' scores, old family letters, etc. Many of these I'll eventually photograph so we can get rid of the originals, but I haven't been able to get to that yet.