Call it the great American sell-off . For years now Americans have been gathering and collecting at an amazing pace, filling homes that over the past half-century have more than doubled in size, to an average of nearly 2,500 square feet. And even that hasn’t been enough to contain our nation’s overflow of stuff. These days nearly one in 10 U.S. households maintains at least one self-storage unit, 65 percent more than did so in 1995. Filling these spaces, of course, comes naturally to baby boomers. Born into the giddy postwar climate of conspicuous consumption and weaned on decades of easy credit, they’re a generation accustomed to regularly leaving offerings at the altar of retail.
That is, until they hit the empty-nest, time-to-start-downsizing phase—and begin wondering what to do with their mountains of accumulated stuff.
…Expect a hired liquidator to do something like:
- —charge 35 percent of the final kitty.
- offer extensive advertising—her mailing list yields more than a few diehard big spenders who sleep overnight in front of the house for the privilege of first dibs
- —staffs the sale with up to a dozen helpers, and transforms the home into a retail boutique, polishing silver, washing baseboards and bringing in tables, racks and display cases.
- she arranges for leftovers to be donated and leaves the house, in industry parlance, “broom clean.”
Try eDivvyup to slice up estates in house.
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