The sale of my mother’s house is imminent — closing is on 3 January. I have spent my afternoons since last week trying to cancel utilities and various services to the house, and it hasn’t been easy. I’ve sat on hold on the phone for an awful lot of time, because, as it turns out, most of these services are reluctant to lose a paying customer, even if she is dead. Much of what I’ve had to do is call, wait for an answer, get told an email address to send a death certificate and letters testamentary, and then wait for a verification phone call. And then discover that the electric company had misspelled her name, which was not an obstacle when billing her, but becomes a problem when telling them to stop billing her.
But finally, it’s all done! The house goes dead on Friday, only to come back to life with new owners.
Next step is to go through a long list of annuities and get them cashed out. Also, a minor thing, I have 21 silver dollars that were in her bank deposit box, I’ll have to get those appraised. I checked out a few of them on the web, and they were selling for somewhere between $10 and $50 each, but I have to wring every penny I can out of everything before I’m done.
As a coin collector I can tell you that the 90% silver dollars are worth a minimum of about $22 each for the silver value alone. The 1879 P Morgan you illustrate is a relatively common date. An honest dealer should give you at least $25 for it. I recommend the PCGS Coin app for identifying any rare ones.
Btw – DO NOT CLEAN ANY OF THE COINS!
That’s about what I’ve been seeing as estimated values, so it sounds about right. That would make my dad’s coin collection worth about $500, which is nice, but nothing to justify saving them for 90 years.
I’m actually thinking that rather than selling them off, I might instead send them off to the heirs as mementos. They’re worth more for the memories than the cash value.
I would never dream of cleaning them!
I was just about to write you should keep them as mementos.
I never had that much trouble with my dad’s or my mom’s utilities. All I had to do was call and say the customer was dead, and that was it. The only exception was my dad’s phone bill, but that was a problem of him being billed several hundred dollars for international calls he hadn’t made, which of course I didn’t want to pay.
Well, I want them to be a little bit of a hassle to close, otherwise someone could call your cable company, say you were dead, and cancel your service for you!
Several years back my wife was the appointed executrix for her aunt. We found about 30 of those Morgan silver dollars. We were told by a local coin dealer the same thing about the value, $20 – $25 dollars. Was surprised they weren’t worth more. She also had to do 5 different annuities, what a PIA that was. She was responsible for paying the taxes on them but since they were willed to her other aunt, it became a tangled web. Had to have the other aunt who lives in Vancouver, Canada contact the different companies to get the value at day of death and get the numbers to us for the accountant. Since the annuities didn’t belong to us, the annuities companies did not want to give us any information. The other aunts concern was minimizing the amount of taxes she was going to have to pay and initially wasn’t really interested in helping us. We finally pried the information out of her after threatening her and her three children wouldn’t get the rest of the money (from the house sale and other things) until the accountant closed the deal with the state and feds. Looking back, as stressful as it was, the whole deal was a great learning experience; glad we went through it.
Ah PZ, in clearing out our house and organising our orecious possessions – books, coins, stamps, antique furniture, china, childrens toys, silver, paintings – we have discovered that nothing is worth anything to anyone else. Depressing as I look at the treasures of a lifetime…
nomdeplume @8
I’m feeling the same way!
We made our final military move in 2019, and bought a lovely bungalow overlooking the Monterey Bay in which to retire.
I’ve carefully unpacked and displayed all of my precious family heirlooms.
I have the china teapot with which my great-gandmother was entrusted as a girl on the ship crossing from Scotland.
I have the green depression glass that my mother and my aunt collected.
I have many beautiful cobalt blue glass pieces that my mother-in-law was obsessed with collecting.
I have several pieces of antique furniture from the 1940s from both sides of the family
It is depressing that all five of our children are too caught up in their modern lives to be at all interested in those treasures.
I can only hope that either one of them becomes interested in family history, or one of the grandchildren does.
@9 Ditto. My children/grandchildren are basically only interested in modern stuff. Antique shops are stuffed full. Charity operations have more than they can handle. Remarkably depressing to throw valued (by us) stuff that we have inherited or bought and kept in good order for t0 years into a pit or shred it.
I’ve got some WWII era foreign paper bills that I’d like to get rid of. I’ve looked on line and they might be worth a little, similar to PZ’s coins. The only physical coin shop I’ve come across in the area proudly proclaim their christianity in all there advertising. For some reason, I don’t trust them. I’ll probably divi them up to the cousins and their kids.
I have some semi-obscure, but supposedly semi-valuable records I’m trying to offload, but it seems the only way to get close to actual value for them is selling them one by one on Ebay or Discogs, which I’d rather not do. All the record stores want to give me pennies on the dollar for them, but I may just accept to get them out of the house (trying desperately to downsize my possessions).
If the best you could do selling them in bulk is pennies on the dollar, then you may as well donate them instead. Libraries, relatives, friends, and neighbors all might be interested, especially if you have anything uncommon.
When my parents downsized and moved house they held a free book giveaway event donating a lot of old books that no longer had space for or wanted to keep. Like a garagfe sale but without the “sale”part -just letting wheover wanted come and take them. It worked pretty well.
When my best friend died unexpectedly, sorting through all that stuff wasn’t just emotionally draining, it was a huge mess. While her sister was officially responsible, I helped as much as I could. She’d died on a holiday abroad and we needed the birth certificate to get the body back. We still haven’t found it. We suppose that she had a lockbox with a bank where she stored the important family documents, but we were never able to find out where and for a while it was this wonderful mess of Italy: in order to give you a certificate of death, we need a certificate of birth. Germany: well, you’re trying to get a certificate of birth for somebody else. We need the certificate of death for that!