Your estate plan

[Spotted Horses]

It should be obvious that worry about one's CD collection finding "a good home" is only relevant when the person is alive. You can worry about what will happen to your disabled offspring when you are gone because they will suffer if they are not well cared for. One's CD collection is not sentient, and will not suffer. Someone should start a service which consists of promising neurotic collectors that their CD collection will be distributed to deserving music lovers, then come in and haul it all to the dump once the poor sap is dead.

[(poco) Sforzando]

It should be obvious that worry about one's CD collection finding "a good home" is only relevant when the person is alive. You can worry about what will happen to your disabled offspring when you are gone because they will suffer if they are not well cared for. One's CD collection is not sentient, and will not suffer. Someone should start a service which consists of promising neurotic collectors that their CD collection will be distributed to deserving music lovers, then come in and haul it all to the dump once the poor sap is dead.

Thanks for the ridicule. I'll be sure not to include you in my will.

Of course I'm well aware that the overwhelming majority of my possessions are of no value whatsoever, and that includes all of my CDs, books, DVDs, and the rest of it. Here and there, however, there are some original pieces of art I would not want destroyed, and some scores that a music student might like to have - printed music being extremely expensive these days. Nothing "neurotic" about that. Unfortunately I have no offspring, disabled or otherwise, and if all my stuff winds up in the dump, well there will be nothing I can do about it, will there?

[Spotted Horses]

Thanks for the ridicule. I'll be sure not to include you in my will.

Of course I'm well aware that the overwhelming majority of my possessions are of no value whatsoever, and that includes all of my CDs, books, DVDs, and the rest of it. Here and there, however, there are some original pieces of art I would not want destroyed, and some scores that a music student might like to have - printed music being extremely expensive these days. Nothing "neurotic" about that. Unfortunately I have no offspring, disabled or otherwise, and if all my stuff winds up in the dump, well there will be nothing I can do about it, will there?

I did not intend this as ridicule. Just making what seems to me an obvious observation. With your original pieces of art you can always have conversations with acquaintances who might have admired them along the lines of, 'if you like that I can see to it that you can have it when I'm gone.' Conversations along the lines of, 'would you like to have my collection of 817 CDs of Bach harpsichord music' might not go over as well. And by the way, I do have a severely disabled child, and what keeps me up at night is wondering what will happen to him when he outlives us and becomes a ward of the state, with no family to love or care for him.

[(poco) Sforzando]

I did not intend this as ridicule. Just making what seems to me an obvious observation. With your original pieces of art you can always have conversations with acquaintances who might have admired them along the lines of, 'if you like that I can see to it that you can have it when I'm gone.' Conversations along the lines of, 'would you like to have my collection of 817 CDs of Bach harpsichord music' might not go over as well. And by the way, I do have a severely disabled child, and what keeps me up at night is wondering what will happen to him when he outlives us and becomes a ward of the state, with no family to love or care for him.

I'm sorry to hear about your child, and I have no idea what your options are in this area. Things on the other hand are just things, and I fully recognize it will matter to no one, least of all myself, what happens to them after I die.

[vandermolen]

I did not intend this as ridicule. Just making what seems to me an obvious observation. With your original pieces of art you can always have conversations with acquaintances who might have admired them along the lines of, 'if you like that I can see to it that you can have it when I'm gone.' Conversations along the lines of, 'would you like to have my collection of 817 CDs of Bach harpsichord music' might not go over as well. And by the way, I do have a severely disabled child, and what keeps me up at night is wondering what will happen to him when he outlives us and becomes a ward of the state, with no family to love or care for him.

I'm very sorry to hear about your disabled child as well Arthur.
All strength to you and to him.
Jeffrey

[Spotted Horses]

Sforzando and Vandermolen, your expression of sympathy are much appreciated. As I learned from Drasko's story on the missing members thread, there are people who have challenges that we cannot even imagine.

[foxandpeng]

All strength to you and to him.
Jeffrey

Yes. Very much this. All best wishes.

[Florestan]

I'm very sorry to hear about your disabled child as well Arthur.
All strength to you and to him.
Jeffrey

Yes. Very much this. All best wishes.

From me too, Arthur.

[owlice]

All best wishes from me as well, Spotted Horses.

Sf, I would think that perhaps smaller schools may not already have large music collections, and might cherish your collection of scores/sheet music?

I'm glad you started this thread, as I have been pondering what to do with some of what is in my house. I have an oil portrait of my son at age 12 that I hope he would want to keep, but the other art... perhaps not. The CDs he would probably do without, too, since he didn't even take his own when he established his own domicile! I do not want to burden him with stuff he does not want. I also have boxes from my mother's house that went straight into the shed over 10 years ago; it appears their heir (my brother) does not seem terribly anxious to retrieve them, alas.

[Spotted Horses]

Thanks to all for good wishes and sympathy. It means a lot.

[Rosalba]

What I wonder is, what to do with family photos, which I've been left with as the daughter on the spot when my Mum died and I had to clear her house. There are six of us children, but it seems sad to split them up and two of us - me and my brother - have no descendants to pass them on to. These days, of course, photos can be copied easily enough but it would take too much awkward and embarrassing organisation.

[staxomega]

This topic comes up often on another music board I'm on where the demographic would be more towards retirement age. The one thing I see that many people agree on is having a dealer come to appraise their collection with them present, set an agreed upon price, and sell it to them when they pass so it won't be a burden to their spouse. This is mostly with the "hot thing" being vinyl collections.

I'm still in my 30s so I haven't paid too much attention to this yet. With my collectable/investment grade cars I will definitely be selling them well before the time comes so as to not make this a headache to anyone. Same with my watches, though I will probably pass these along. I consider my music collection essentially worthless to anyone but myself with it being 80% classical and jazz, the remainder 20% comprising of 90s rock, IDM, hip hop, current indie music. My older kid has no interest in classical. My toddler seems to get a kick out of French music though this might be me projecting, for even a two year old it's not too difficult to differentiate Aphex Twin from Ravel's Piano Trio

I did not intend this as ridicule. Just making what seems to me an obvious observation. With your original pieces of art you can always have conversations with acquaintances who might have admired them along the lines of, 'if you like that I can see to it that you can have it when I'm gone.' Conversations along the lines of, 'would you like to have my collection of 817 CDs of Bach harpsichord music' might not go over as well. And by the way, I do have a severely disabled child, and what keeps me up at night is wondering what will happen to him when he outlives us and becomes a ward of the state, with no family to love or care for him.

All the best to you and your child as well, and sorry to hear about the stress this is causing you.

What I wonder is, what to do with family photos, which I've been left with as the daughter on the spot when my Mum died and I had to clear her house. There are six of us children, but it seems sad to split them up and two of us - me and my brother - have no descendants to pass them on to. These days, of course, photos can be copied easily enough but it would take too much awkward and embarrassing organisation.

I had a company scan our family photos to a USB drive then gave them to my parents for their wedding anniversary. I have an entry level Canon scanner and with it set to 600 DPI it would have taken far too long, so IMHO paying someone else was worth it to me. Maybe get them scanned then give them to the rest of your siblings.

As for the organization part, I didn't think of that. It was just one big mess of photos

[(poco) Sforzando]

This topic comes up often on another music board I'm on where the demographic would be more towards retirement age. The one thing I see that many people agree on is having a dealer come to appraise their collection with them present, set an agreed upon price, and sell it to them when they pass so it won't be a burden to their spouse. This is mostly with the "hot thing" being vinyl collections.

I would be interested to learn about this other music board; perhaps you can message me if you don't want to reveal its name publicly.

I agree that most CDs are of negligible value anymore, especially classical. Even classical music-lovers often use streaming services or rip their collections to digital media. I can easily store 65-70 hours of music on a 64Gb flash drive to keep in the car for automotive listening. I could probably put my whole collection on a 4Tb external drive. Except that drives can fail, and I have kept a nostalgic attachment to physical product.

Scores matter somewhat more to me. I think I'll start by querying the local libraries to see what if anything might be of interest. My own town library has a pretty good collection for a public institution, but I have easily five times as much, and a lot of expensive copyrighted material from composers like Shostakovich, Stockhausen, Carter, Ligeti, Boulez, Janacek, Prokofiev, and others. Of course people can now find all the public domain stuff on IMSLP, but the copyrighted stuff might have some interest for somebody.

My collection of original art is pretty modest, but I still have a couple of dozen respectable pieces, and here a qualified appraiser would be worth engaging. I don't care if my copy of Van Cliburn's Tchaikovsky concerto survives me, but I would not want any good artist's creative work to be thrown into a dumpster.

[Irons]

Over decades I have built a collection of 6,000 or so classical vinyl records plus a smattering of jazz. Being in my mid-seventies, although touch-wood enjoying good health the grim reaper will in not too distant future undoubtedly cast his evil glint in my direction. Once your gone you are gone but a collection so painstakingly built up ending in landfill is not good from my perspective.
The marketplace for LPs is extremely top-heavy. In monetary terms 95% of the records on my shelves are worth very little, the remaining 5% are worth quite a bit. The problem for family members left to sort it out is they have no idea which is which. It has been suggested that I mark the collectable LPs in some way but that will prove to be an extremely difficult operation. The LPs I prize the most are worth little and vice versa.     

[staxomega]

I would be interested to learn about this other music board; perhaps you can message me if you don't want to reveal its name publicly.

That forum's search isn't so great, there have been a few threads discussing it, here are a couple: https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/will-estate-planning-and-our-collections.978213/

https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/what-happens-to-your-music-collection-when-you-die.22148/

Scores matter somewhat more to me. I think I'll start by querying the local libraries to see what if anything might be of interest. My own town library has a pretty good collection for a public institution, but I have easily five times as much, and a lot of expensive copyrighted material from composers like Shostakovich, Stockhausen, Carter, Ligeti, Boulez, Janacek, Prokofiev, and others. Of course people can now find all the public domain stuff on IMSLP, but the copyrighted stuff might have some interest for somebody.

I used to make use of interlibrary loan in the past for music, but my library has now entirely shut that off after they told me they can only send things via Fedex 2-day which is too expensive. So now it's only available for books. Their own download system for music is far inferior selection wise compared to Qobuz, which is now my go to for sampling music to see if I want to buy it. All around annoying given our rather high property taxes.

I would hope the libraries would be happy to take them, I haven't needed to check scores for really exotic works or needed great detail between editions so IMSLP, Google image search, and even Youtube have been fine for me.

My collection of original art is pretty modest, but I still have a couple of dozen respectable pieces, and here a qualified appraiser would be worth engaging. I don't care if my copy of Van Cliburn's Tchaikovsky concerto survives me, but I would not want any good artist's creative work to be thrown into a dumpster.

Definitely seems like a good idea for art.

[(poco) Sforzando]

That forum's search isn't so great, there have been a few threads discussing it, here are a couple: https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/will-estate-planning-and-our-collections.978213/

https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/what-happens-to-your-music-collection-when-you-die.22148/

I used to make use of interlibrary loan in the past for music, but my library has now entirely shut that off after they told me they can only send things via Fedex 2-day which is too expensive. So now it's only available for books. Their own download system for music is far inferior selection wise compared to Qobuz, which is now my go to for sampling music to see if I want to buy it. All around annoying given our rather high property taxes.

I would hope the libraries would be happy to take them, I haven't needed to check scores for really exotic works or needed great detail between editions so IMSLP, Google image search, and even Youtube have been fine for me.

Definitely seems like a good idea for art.

Thank you. I already talked to the director of my local public library earlier this week, and at least there's some sign of interest in the more collectible items. (I don't expect any interest in cheap Kalmus or Eulenberg copies of Beethoven symphonies, but things like Shostakovich quartets and symphonies, Carter quartets, and the Berg operas are another matter.)

As for art, I'll start by talking to some gallery owners from whom I've purchased in the past.