Oh, boy. You got me started. For starters, think about two things: (1) what hell your family will go through to clean out your hoarded stuff after something happens to you, and (2) potential legal issues from that stuff sitting around.
My father was a real hoarder. He had projects in mind for the things he would accumulate, and though he had some skill in getting older machinery to work, he just didn't have the time for all of it. In addition, in his final years he was living in a town that had rules against junk and derelict vehicles in yards. And most of the things he had accumulated were essentially junk. It was questionable whether he could make anything usable out of it. Other items would legally have been a problem to make usable, such as a sailboat on a trailer someone had given him that had no paperwork. Dad wanted to add kayaks to the sides and make a catamaran out of it (insert roll-eyes emoji here).
The town had been all over Dad's case about the derelict vehicles and stuff around the yard. I think because of him, the town passed an ordinance saying that unlicensed vehicles could no longer be kept in a yard even with a cover on them.
His sisters (my aunts) and their adult children (my cousins) and my brother and I worked for days to get two houses and yards cleaned out after he died, but we got it done. (One house had been my grandparents', the other his.) We filled two large salvage dumpsters with all of the junk. What little bit had value that we were able to sell was, mostly, actually my grandfather's leftover stuff.
In the end, very little of Dad's property remained after all of that work. I drove his old pickup for several years as needed for hauling or pulling a trailer, but it needed serious work to keep running and I finally junked it in 2022. The only significant thing of his I have today, 15 years after his passing, is a small utility trailer that I use to haul brush to the nearby city dump.
The sailboat finally went a few years after he died after sitting in the same spot in the side yard for who knows how long. It was full of water and I would not have trusted it in a river or lake even if I had had the ability to work on it, because it was fiberglass and the water inside had been through freeze-thaw cycles. In the end I had to take it to a landfill and pay a fee to dispose of it and the trailer. Turned out the boat did have a title (part of that missing paperwork Dad never got from the previous owner), and I had to show the state that it had been scrapped to get it off my taxes.
Financial advisors tell older clients to find out whether your adult children will even want your collections, classic vehicles, furniture, etc., after you pass away. Often the children won't, and we're talking about usable items. Most younger people will have no interest, no room, no time, and no money to maintain any of it. Now imagine that what you're collecting is scrap and junk. Do you really think they'll want any of it? Do you want them to spend days cleaning out junk when they have their own lives and obligations? Think carefully about this.
All right, I'm off the soapbox. Flame away.
