Book Review: Inheriting Clutter: How to Calm the Chaos Your Parents Leave Behind by Julie Hall
January 12, 2022
By Melinda Gustafson Gervasi
My rating: 3 out of 5 stars
Julie Hall's book, Inheriting Clutter: How to Calm the Chaos Your Parents Leave Behind, consists of 16 chapters along with several resources in the appendix. From the book's title, I anticipated a more narrowly focused discussion of how to handle the physical "stuff" that makes up an estate. However, Hall spent significant time exploring more general estate planning and probate concepts: what is a will, how powers of attorney work, what is probate, etc.
Overall, the book provides the reader with some excellent suggestions on how to locate and secure a qualified appraiser for personal possessions, options for distributing tangible property from an estate, and where to look for hidden money of valuables in a home (i.e. check inside all the shoes). The appendices offer some useful questions and forms as well for those faced with the daunting task of administering an estate.
As a estate planning and probate attorney of 15+ years I did find the book to make several unsettling assumptions. One, the assumption that "families" are comprised of a mom, dad, several children, all of whom are on good terms and have a family home. That is a minority of households in modern day America. Two, the assumption that the adult child should be in the driver's seat of his or her parents' estate plan. In reality, the parent is the client and the one making the decisions even if an adult child disagrees. And lastly, third the book does not speak enough to the situations in which a "family" has dysfunction, blended families, estrangements, or no marriages or children.
