S3 E53: 📦 What to Do with the Stuff You Inherit with Nick Fox
This podcast is for educational purposes only and does not constitute mental health, financial, tax, or legal advice.
Episode Summary
In this episode of the Money Healing Club podcast, Rachel Duncan sits down with Nick Fox, creator of the Millennial Inheritance Project, a community documenting the very particular experience of inheriting objects instead of wealth. From 3,000 signed baseballs to a mother's beloved library, Rachel and Nick get into grief, family dynamics, identity, memory, and why letting go of stuff is so much heavier than it looks.
Rachel also opens up about her own ongoing experience with the boxes still in her basement after her mother's passing.
💬 "You didn't inherit money, you inherited stuff." — Nick Fox
Key Takeaways:
Inheriting stuff is its own kind of grief, separate from any money that changes hands.
Value is subjective. What one person treasures, another sees as clutter, and both feelings are valid.
When you cannot feel someone else's attachment to an object, a useful question is: what utility does it have for me?
The conversation with aging parents lands better from curiosity than from combativeness.
A full basement or garage is not the same as hoarding, which is a clinical condition that deserves care, not judgment.
⏰ Episode Breakdown
06:30 | Where the millennial inheritance community came from. How one sarcastic video about a box of "Oneida crap" turned into a movement.
23:00 | Why value is completely subjective. From the Beanie Baby crash to a mother's beloved books.
26:15 | The one question to ask about any inherited object. Moving from someone else's sentiment to your own sense of utility.
37:00 | Two-pronged advice. One message for the elders holding the collection, one for the kids who will manage it.
About Nick Fox: Nick is the creator and curator of the Millennial Inheritance Project, a community documenting what it really means to inherit someone's lifetime of belongings. He is a radio person, a husband, and, in his own words, a very normal person trying to make sense of this alongside the rest of us.
🔗 Resources mentioned
International OCD Foundation hoarding center, for anyone concerned about hoarding disorder
Lead safety in inherited ceramics: creators like "Lead Mama" and "the Lead Guy,"
💌 Connect with Nick Fox
@nickfoxradio on all socials
@millennialinheritance on socials and podcast platforms
🎙️ Have a money story or question?
Click the big orange button on our site, right from your phone or browser, and let me know: what is sitting in your basement or closet right now that you have not been able to let go of?https://www.moneyhealingclub.com/podcast
💝 Support the Podcast
Help keep the Money Healing Club podcast going! If this show has helped you feel less alone or more grounded with money, please consider contributing here: https://buy.stripe.com/4gMdRb3Nc9ZKfpM2MQd7q0b
🎧 Your next listen:
👵🏽 When Your Parents' Financial Trauma Becomes Your Money Mindset
🎙️We're a proud member of the Feminist Podcasters Collective where creators like me are uplifting diverse voices and driving meaningful change.
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📦 What to Do with the Stuff You Inherit with Nick Fox
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Rachel Duncan: [00:00:00] I didn't get money. I got a lot of stuff.
Nick Fox: Yeah, and you know, it's funny, like I personally have used, "You didn't inherit money, you inherited stuff," as kind of a tagline.
Rachel Duncan: Welcome back to the Money Healing Club podcast, the softest place to land in personal finance. I'm Rachel Duncan. I'm a certified financial therapist and art therapist, and I founded the Money Healing Club. It's the best place on the internet to heal your emotional relationship with money. You can find everything at moneyhealingclub.com. Just a reminder, this podcast is for education and entertainment purposes only and does not replace mental health, finance, or tax advising. So today's episode takes a big step back where we're gonna look at legacy in a much broader way, and then we're gonna zoom all the way in on the fascinating topic of stuff, the physical objects in our home.
What might be your treasure is someone else's clutter [00:01:00] and vice versa But this isn't about minimalism. This is not just about your clutter. It's about the inevitable inheritance of physical stuff that many of us will one day need to contend with after someone we love dies But we're also not just talking about stuff and practical tips. There's a little bit of that. We're talking about grief, family dynamics, identity, memory, value, and what happens when life hands you a basement full of, let's say, emotional complexity. And this is a story I know intimately. My mother lived in my home for the last six years of her life, and oh my, did she love her things.
We moved twice together, and we let go of so much in the process, but it came with real grief. She never found relief in a decluttered closet the way I do. She just loved her linens, her dishware, her books, and her craft supplies, even though she rarely crafted. It really came from how she grew up and experienced World War [00:02:00] II and other really tough things in her life.
And even though my mom died in 2021, I still have boxes in my basement filled with her files, old catalogs, photographs, belongings, junk mail, and treasures I've processed a lot of it, but honestly, I'm exhausted. And not just emotionally exhausted, like yes, it's absolutely that, but just the sheer physical reality of a person's lifetime of belongings.
There are simply too many things to even sort through in a weekend. So when I stumbled across the Millennial Inheritance Project on social media, I felt instantly seen. It struck such a nerve. I knew immediately that I wanted to bring its creator, Nick Fox, onto this podcast to talk, because this experience is so rarely talked about, and yet I have a feeling many of you have lived this, too.
Nick Fox is the creator and curator of the Millennial Inheritance Project, a fascinating and unexpectedly [00:03:00] moving community documenting the very particular experience of adults inheriting, well, not necessarily money. Sometimes it's dishware, glassware, 3,000 baseballs, 15,000 VHS tapes. Sometimes it's Beanie Babies.
Remember that? And sometimes it's just the emotional weight of an entire lifetime of objects that someone else deeply valued, and now you have to somehow figure out what to do with it all. Nick Fox is a radio person, a husband, and a curator of millennial inheritance. And importantly, just a very normal person trying to make sense of this complex issue alongside the rest of us.
I loved talking with Nick. We talked about inherited stuff, family dynamics, grief, value, legacy, and why letting go is often far more emotional than we expect. Each generation has really different relationships with their physical belongings. Before we get into the episode, I actually want to do a little reading time.
By the way, I love reading aloud. Last night, I just started [00:04:00] reading this book, Buckeye, by Patrick Ryan. Like, literally, I'm just on the first chapter. And there's a passage where the main character, a young man named Cal in the 1930s, talks about his father named Everett. And boy, did this strike a chord with me The trouble was the way his father's brain worked, Cal thought.
The trouble was also all the stuff. Everett had just barely managed to scrape his family's way through the Depression and couldn't abide by waste. He kept clothes from decades past, his own and what he found. He kept food he was never going to eat, food that had gone bad. He kept magazines, newspapers, calendars, can labels, buttons, matchbooks, pencil stubs, the skulls of rabbits and the squirrels he'd shot and eaten, spools of thread and coils of rope and wire, cast iron skillets and rejected bells and clappers from the defunct bell factory.
He kept every make and manner of kitchen utensil he'd found by rummaging through the town dump or through other people's garbage [00:05:00] cans. He kept envelopes, catalogs, birthday cards sent to strangers.
He maintained no liquor cabinet, but stationed and hidden around the house were bottles of all kinds of booze he'd bought or found or been given as a payment for some odd job. In the backyard were five Model Ts, none of them drivable.
They'd become receptacles for empty cans and mason jars, for scrap wood and car parts. One car rolled off the assembly line the year Cal was born had been turned into a chicken coop
Back
to Rachel now. If you've ever stood in front of a pile of inherited things and thought, "What am I supposed to do with all of this?" Or, "Why does this feel so much heavier than it should?" This talk is for you. Look, having a lot of stuff does not count as hoarding, and I want us to be really careful with that term.
Nick and I talk about it briefly, but hoarding is a mental health disorder that needs expert care to treat, and neither of us are specialists. If you're concerned that someone you know is living with a hoarding disorder, please do your research. And one [00:06:00] resource is the International OCD Foundation, which has a hoarding center.
I will link to that in the show notes. Now let's talk about what we don't usually say when we talk about other people's treasures with Nick Fox.
Rachel Duncan: Okay, cool. Nick Fox, welcome to The Money Healing Club podcast. Thank you for being here.
Nick Fox: Of course.
Rachel Duncan: So you have started something very cool and unique, the Millennial Inheritance Community Project. Could you just tell us a little bit about where did this come from? I think it's a pretty recent thing. Just catch us up a little bit on your project.
Nick Fox: Yeah. The Millennial Inheritance Community was birthed out of sheer sarcasm back in October of last year, 2025. My wife and I were just a couple millennials sitting around our newly bought home, going through boxes that we had been taking from house to house and rental to rental over the course of about a decade.
And we [00:07:00] decided that we were gonna try to stay put in our new house for some time, and as a result, we were committing ourselves to purging, to triaging, to getting through everything. Little bit of context. In 2018, my wife's grandmother passed away, and we called her Nani, very affectionately.
And after she passed away, we did not anticipate that some of her stuff would eventually come to us, 'cause it wasn't actually officially left to us in a will. As a result, most of it being left to my mother-in-law and her two siblings, one of which lives in Colorado, the other one was living locally, didn't wanna have anything to do with the stuff.
So it was up to my MIL to triage an entire house. Little more context. Nani was Silent Gen, so she kept a lot of things. There was a lot of scarcity mindset. There was a lot of milk that had been expired type mentalities that still need to be [00:08:00] kept in the fridge. And little did we know, even though we would go to visit her, she was also dealing with probably some, some loneliness issues, and she would just buy things and shove them in a closet.
And this level of, like, shopping addiction compounded with the, you know, already being a generation that has kind of a scarcity mindset led to a point where my mother-in-law now has had a storage unit since 2018. She had one before that, but now it's like, it's just grown. She's tried to triage and, and she too also has some of her own issues of kinda like OCD and, and needing to go through every box, but doesn't have the time, capacity, and now she has had two back surgeries.
So what's happening is she's just been offloading it to, to me and my wife as she can. And so, so you add all this together, and in October, my wife and I are sitting there with boxes that we don't remember saying yes to, to [00:09:00] items that we don't remember saying, "Yeah, we volunteer to take this, this box or this thing," and it just resulted in one video that we posted called The Millennial Inheritance, Random Oneida Crap Edition.
And it was just essentially me videotaping my wife impromptu and her just absolutely ripping her inheritance to shreds. And about 80% of the comments were from like millennials and Gen X and other folks that were like, "Girl, same. Yes, 100%." And then the other 20% were like people that were like, "Ungrateful."
Like, "They shouldn't give you people money." And like, "You don't deserve nice things." So that video really made me and Sarah, like the comment, blew up. It got hundreds of thousands of views on Instagram. Wasn't expecting that. And then I made a, a follow-up video essentially defending my wife from the trolls saying like, "You don't have the context.
She's overwhelmed. Let me provide some of the context to you." And it started this like snowball from the top of the hill of [00:10:00] now declutterer accounts are reaching out to me wanting to me to be on their podcast. And, and suddenly like there's this whole part of social media that was like alien to me that I've kind of been thrust in the middle of, and people are appreciative of how I am able to kind of talk my way through these very complex emotional situations, but also to be objectively hilarious when I need to be about how obscure they are.
I
Rachel Duncan: mean, I think you really touched a nerve. That's why I think it's so compelling. Like, there's plenty of decluttering stuff out there. That's not actually what you're talking about, right? It's like, what about the stuff we never even bought, we never asked for, that's connected to people we love or situations that were tough and emotionally fraught?
And that it's like the double whammy of the emotional burden and the literal stuff burden, and it's both there. And as an elder millennial myself, and I have-- I am absolutely living this right now, [00:11:00] and that's why I was like, "I have to have you on my podcast," 'cause we have to talk about my basement.
And like, both of my parents have passed, and what I have inherited from them, and it's such a lived experience for me. And it is the inheritance. I didn't get money. I got a lot of stuff.
Nick Fox: Yeah, and you know, it's funny, like I personally have used, "You didn't inherit money, you inherited stuff," as kind of a tagline.
It's, it's my way of oversimplifying the things that I think everybody feels, whether it be Gen X, boomers. Boomers have been there. Boomers had silent gen parents. Like, let's, let's, let's give the boomers their, their due too. My mother-in-law, she's the boomer that's dealing with her mom's stuff, and that's how we all ended up here.
Like, and so, so from, like, a generational standpoint, it's funny 'cause, like, at first I labeled Millennial Inheritance 'cause I'm like, this is me and Sarah. We're two millennials going through our stuff. But also I was like, I knew I wanted to be in the millennial lane on the apps. Did I know I wanted to be in the inheritance lane on the apps?
No. But the Millennial [00:12:00] Inheritance was, like, such a cool name that I was like, "I gotta, I gotta stick with this, man." And, and, and it was interesting because once I realized that the content was, like, resonating with people and working, I stopped doing my other, like, more random social media stuff, and I just did this.
So for anyone out there that's an aspiring content creator, sometimes when something works, you, you need to double down on it and do it again and again. Yeah, and so it's opened up doors. Yeah
Rachel Duncan: Yeah, fill in your content because it started with your own journey, obviously. It struck a nerve, and then though, you have added the word community 'cause that's really present in now- Yeah
what you're doing.
Nick Fox: Yeah, I can talk about that evolution and be transparent about, like, where I think this could go and is going and, and all that. Like, a- a- and, and, uh, it's interesting 'cause it's like I'm probably the only one that can do this type of community now, which is really strange. It started with me just documenting my triage.
[00:13:00] So I would start with my yearbooks, my photo albums, literally going through it. It was, like, my way of immortalizing my photo albums from middle school. Do you know what I mean? Being like, "Why do I have a photo of, like, part of a hand and a girl's face?" Do you know what I mean? Like, what are we hanging on to all, all this stuff for?
And so then from there, I just kept triaging my stuff, and then when I ran out of, like, stuff to triage, I was, I was talking to my wife, and she was like listening to my ideas, and my ideas were, like, a little bit negative. And she was like, "Look, listen, there's enough negative on the internet." She was like, "Why don't you just do, like, the radio thing?"
And, like, in radio, we're, we're taught to have a lived experience and then share that lived experience on the radio with the hopes that your listeners will come back to you and say, "Yes, uh, I have a similar experience. Let me tell you about mine." Right. And so it's, it's, it's like it starts with you, and then it becomes not making it about you.
[00:14:00] So I started to ask people about their inheritances, and I made a video talking about it, and it was called The Millennial Inheritance Community Submissions, and it talked about the context of what's happened and the fact that a few people had already started to send me their inheritances on social media.
And now I'm actually asking to open the floodgates of the internet to say, "Hey, look, if you have, if you have something that's, that you inherited that's weird, send me photos, send me pictures." And that was, like, late October, early November 2025, and my DMs have not stopped since.
Rachel Duncan: It must be tough to choose.
Yeah, it must be tough to choose, like, if it's that full. Yeah.
Nick Fox: It, it becomes really overwhelming. It's like drinking from the bottom of, like, a lake. And, but, but it's been, it's been cool. You know, like I, I opted to do this. You know, I, I asked for this. It's also, it's, it's the community's ability to be able to, like, give me content [00:15:00] nonstop, but there's more to it than that.
And some of the things that have been cool is, like, I've, I've kinda segmented it out. There's the You Inherited Stuff videos that are designed to provide new people context and invite them into the community. There's the videos that are straight community submissions from people on the internet that found the page.
They start sending me their stuff. And then there's our Millennial Inheritance Deep Dives, which covers some of the most commonly inherited items that people get hummels, Lladró, Longaberger baskets, dishware, uranium glass. These are all things that we consistently cover. And so as a result of all those things, we've been able to tap into all these different communities, which has probably been, for me, the most fun thing.
But I think the community part that you harping back to is important because I do feel like this is a community, and some of the things that I'm, I'm hoping to do in the future would be, like, a weekly or monthly support group on [00:16:00] Instagram or on one of the apps where it's, like, live and people can talk about their experiences of their triage.
Because ultimately, the thing that has been most gratifying about this experience is making people feel seen
Rachel Duncan: Yeah. I, I, I think it's wonderful. Okay, so I'd love to s- there are some examples though. Like, do you have a recent example of something surprising or even, like, all-time kind of strangest things or more surprising things?
Also, you touched on the emotional stuff, like people inheriting pets-
Nick Fox: Yeah ...
Rachel Duncan: and things like that. So, like, what-- Give us some greatest hits.
Nick Fox: Yeah. You know, I think, I think some of the things that I'm most proud of would be my Judaica video, which Rae Ann is a community member in the District of Columbia, Maryland, Virginia area, and she just lost her mom in, like, February, and then her stepdad a couple weeks later.
So she had hundreds of Seder plates and hamsas and beautiful and ornate [00:17:00] menorahs that had been collected over the course of many years, and her mom used these to teach kids about their faith and essentially to help them get to their bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah. For those of you that don't know Judaism that well, a bar mitzvah is for boys, bat mitzvah is for girls.
And so these were generally speaking, she would use this stuff to teach kids that were some sort of special needs. Rae Ann is sitting in, in her apartment looking around, not knowing what she's gonna do with all this stuff, but knows that her mom had this, like, mission in life. And her mom just wants the stuff to go to somewhere where it's gonna be loved.
So she found us. She found my page. She reached out to me and was like, "I don't know what to do." And this is the first time I ever took a vested interest in helping someone getting their stuff rehomed. And I just said, "Jews, we need your help." You know? And so the, like the Jewish community from all up and down the East Coast, West Coast, and even as far as Jerusalem.
A museum curator in Jerusalem found my video. And [00:18:00] the ironic thing is, a few months prior to this, I did a video on how museums do not want your inherited items, and yet a museum came knocking on the door to get the collection from Rae Ann.
Rachel Duncan: I, I think the message is let the museums curate their own stuff.
Nick Fox: Exactly, 100%. You know, museums have storage limits. They've got a, a shoestring budget. They've got all these different things. So I think that's the video I'm most proud of so far. I'm actually currently working with someone that's in Colorado, and she is going through an overwhelming inheritance situation where she inherited 3,000 signed baseballs.
And as a result of the signed baseballs, she has, she's got some problems ahead of her because not only does she have the task of selling the baseballs, which can be extremely lucrative, don't get me wrong, but the problem is because of all the fakes, the authentication process has become such a lengthy [00:19:00] challenge.
So I'm working with her to try to put together a really comprehensive video. There have been some, some weird ones though, like, and, and it becomes increasingly weird. You know, last week I shared a, a gag gift called a rectal candle alarm clock, which are words that do not belong together.
Rachel Duncan: I just watched that- It-
'cause I was catching up. I was like, "We have to talk about the rectal candle" ...
Nick Fox: So essentially it was like a gag gift of like stick this in your butt and light it and then, you know, it'll, it'll wake you up in the morning. You're outside of your mind.
Rachel Duncan: And, like, it looks like it's so old. Like this is true antiques.
Nick Fox: Yeah, it looks like it was bought at a gas station in 1954. I, I gotta wonder that our parents didn't save some of this stuff as evidence. Do you know what I mean? Like-
Rachel Duncan: Right. They'll, they'll never believe this existed.
Nick Fox: Greatest generation was not so great.
Rachel Duncan: The greatest sense of humor.
Nick Fox: Perhaps they were racist and weird.
You know, like-
Rachel Duncan: Probably. Let's, uh, keep this in the basement for my grandkids to know. [00:20:00]
Nick Fox: I, I, speaking of like stuff that's like, oh, off the wall, you know, I, so I have as early as October received photos of racially insensitive dolls And I haven't done a episode on that yet because I feel like it's deserving of experts on the panel and not just, you know what I mean?
Like I, I could, I could give my take. But then, but then interesting thing happened. Someone started sending me spoils of war, which also made me feel things. So now I'm seeing SS bands and swastikas that were pulled off of dead Nazis that are ... If, if I'm ever pulled over by the cops for, for anything and they go into my phone, they're going to have so many questions.
Do you know what I mean? Like
Rachel Duncan: Right. And then like, what's that going to do to my algorithm? Exactly. I mean, I mean, and, and it just being such a, right, we're, we're talking in trigger warning territory.
Nick Fox: Oh, yeah, absolutely. And, and, and respectfully, you know, we talk about these things to educate. We talk about these things [00:21:00] because it brought up some, some questions that I had for myself going into the series of like, okay, so moving forward from a trying to educate people on what to do with these objects, there's two schools of thought.
It's like, "Burn it. Get rid of it. It deserves to be off the face of the planet." And then the other school of thought is, "Oh, hang on, now we're getting rid of history. And to get rid of history is to forget that history happened." And so these two schools of thought are, are kind of conflicting. And for me personally, there comes a moment in everything that I talk about where it's like, ultimately it's up to you.
It's up to the person who inherited the things to try to make the best educated decision that they can about the stuff that they have. But the stuff that, that we get is increasingly weird. You know, chainsaw wind chimes and, you know, 27,000 coffee mugs in a barn and it's just, it just gets weirder and weirder.
And some [00:22:00] people have, uh, you know, some people are really passionate about militaria. We had one guy that had like, he's got a bomb. He's got a literal bo- like it's a bomb.
Rachel Duncan: My gosh.
Nick Fox: It's not active, right? But it's like a bomb that was strapped to a Japanese airplane in World War II.
The stuff that I get in my DMs becomes increasingly weird as we kind of tap into some of these communities. Like I didn't know the militaria community was a thing. I didn't know the museum community was going to be like, "Thank you for your service, sir." I didn't know that the Breyer horse community was like, "Hey, maybe you want to come to BreyerFest, you know, like see what this is all about."
Like, so which may or may not happen. They, they're, they've been intermittent, the Breyer horse people, whether I'm coming or not. But it's, it's been, it's been really interesting and just to kind of like sit back and, and observe What the content has led to in the way of, like, other communities and other content and people that are passionate about what they collect Mm-hmm.
Rachel Duncan: Right. Right, right. What we [00:23:00] collect and, like, what our, what is our legacy. I actually wonder what this brings for you full circle of, like, how does this impact your view of your stuff, your legacy, what you might leave for others? Yeah. Well, so fortunately, my wife and I are not having children. We've, we've made that choice.
Nick Fox: But I do, I do have, I do have thoughts about, like, what's gonna get left behind and to whom, and, and what do I actually own? Like, right now I own clothing, I own some computer stuff, and I own a few sentimental objects. Grand scheme of things, I don't own a whole lot. You know what I mean? And as a result, it has put things in perspective for me over the course of my whole life.
So I recently got A millennial passed away, and his sister has been triaging his Magic: The Gathering cards and Star Trek: The Next Generation cards, which are both cards that I grew up collecting. And so as I've gone through the [00:24:00] process of creating the videos and talking about how essentially corporations weaponize scarcity, it has put card collecting in perspective.
It has put collecting objects in perspective. It has put all these things in perspective. You know, and the first video I did that, that really shined a light on this and made me realize that, like, I really don't need to be worried about accumulating stuff. I need to be worried about accumulating experiences.
The first video was the Beanie Baby episode because-
Rachel Duncan: Oh, we all lived through that ...
Nick Fox: this was the, the stock market crash of our childhoods, man. Ty Warner is the billionaire that owned Beanie Babies, and he was not the first person to weaponize scarcity, but maybe was the first person to be like, "I wonder if I can get kids addicted to it."
You know what I mean? Like, uh, and, and maybe that wasn't the nefarious thought that he had. Maybe it was just the thing that people were doing in a commercial space because it happened with all the things that we see in a curio cabinet that our parents collected: snow babies, [00:25:00] porcelain, Hummels, Precious Moments.
These are all things that, you know, that people collected, and, oh, this one's gonna be rare. It's gonna be worth so much money, and now we find out that that is just not the case, sadly, so...
Rachel Duncan: Oh, the hype. Yeah, it was. And it makes me think of, you know, value. Value's incredibly s- it is subjective. It's entirely subjective.
I mean, even looking at money, the only reason this whole money thing works is we all believe in the fiction.
Nick Fox: We believe in value, yeah.
Rachel Duncan: Yeah. And it is subjective. And, you know, like, like, my mom was a big reader. She has had thousands and thousands of books. She was living with me when she passed on, and these books were so important to her, and, but it's, it's taken years for me to say, "Mother, they're not my books."
Right. You know, she valued them so much, and she was a very, very bright woman, and, like, intellectual pursuits were really important to her, and I've, I've curated it. I've [00:26:00] certainly held onto some of them, but, like, sort of every year I look on the shelf, I'm like, literally, like, in my living room, where are my books?
Like, it's all her books. And, and for me, it's been this space of like, well, what, what do I want my library to be? It's different than hers, and it should be, you know? And it's... But also the sheer volume of it, the just, the literal physical volume and You know, I'm a big thrifter. I love secondhand stuff, and I want things to be reused.
And so then it takes that care. You know, I pulled out-- She actually, she was a hobbyist of, uh, botanic illustration, so she had a ton of botanic illustration books, which are gorgeous. I mean, these are like $80 books. They're like really, really nice art quality books. So, you know, I gathered them all together.
I took them to, to her school of botanic illustration and gave them to them for the library. But again, it's like a fraction, and it's like there's a weekend gone. At a certain point, while that felt good, I don't have time to do that with everything [00:27:00] that had value to her, that has value to the marketplace, you know, uh, not wanting to just burden the thrift stores and the Goodwills of the area, you know.
It's simply exhausting when you've got someone's lifetime of things that they valued, and it, it's a real exercise, and it's unclear. I think it's just slowly evolving for me, like what of this has value for me?
Nick Fox: Yeah, and that's the right question to ask. When all else fails and you don't understand what the senti-sentimentality of an object was to someone else, you say, "What utility does it have for me?"
Interestingly, this week something happened in the community that made me have an epiphany, and it was someone that they recently Tried to have a conversation with her father about, like, his basement side business that took up everything. And I think every time she brought it up with him, he felt like she was trying to get him to offload everything.
Like, "Sell it all. Be done with your side quest business." And that wasn't the [00:28:00] case. So she asked, like, if I could share her story and yada, yada. And I was like, "What if I just made you a video for you and your dad to watch?" And I made her a video.
Rachel Duncan: Oh, just like a bespoke thing- Yes ... just for
Nick Fox: them. Just for you guys.
Let's see if I can help you facilitate a conversation with your dad using the talking points, using things that we've said. And, and so I, I made her a video, and I sent it over to her, and she watched it, and she was like, "This is great. I'm gonna use these talking points and try to talk, have a conversation with my dad instead."
So she used the, the talking points from the video, and now she's had a conversation with her dad, and her dad's like, "Oh, you don't wanna get rid of my stuff? Okay. You just wanna document it? You just wanna, like, you just wanna know what's what? Like, oh. Oh yeah, we can put a whole weekend aside, and we can go, and we can take notes and, and, and we'll..."
So like, so it's like, okay, there may b- there may be a market for me doing videos for the community about, like, trying to help or at least putting together, like, a here's how to get started with having these conversations or, you know, something to that [00:29:00] effect, yeah. So because it's tough.
Rachel Duncan: It's almost like a, yeah, it's like a mediator or a, you know, "Hey, we're actually both on the same side.
Let's..." You know, it's like what a mediator does is like, "Actually, we have a lot of aligning interests. We just need to find those." And like, he wants his, his legacy, his stuff, his interest to be honored, and she's like, "I wanna honor it, too, and I know that I'm probably gonna be part of this, and it, this would really help me."
Like, we're all actually on the same side here.
Nick Fox: Like, I think it's, I think it's triggering for people. You know? It's triggering for people to be like, "Oh, you wanna get rid of, you just wanna get rid of my stuff, and you just want me, you just want my money when I'm gone." Like, no. Like, spend your money, please.
Like, if there's anything left over, please think of me. If not, no big deal. I just don't wanna be left with a mess. I don't wanna be left with a whole bunch of stuff in a curio cabinet, and I don't know what it means to you, and as a result, I'm asking questions here, you know? And, and I think that's something that a lot of people have started to relate...
Like, a lot of people, when they find my videos, they start sharing them with their loved ones, and then a [00:30:00] lot of them are taking the talking points back and using them, and then it's working out that they are coming to resolutions rather than nothing happening. And, and that's- Mm-hmm ... really gratifying.
Rachel Duncan: Kicking it down the line. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's really cool. I could really see some, yeah, some guidebooks, some, a, a little consulting gig, Nick.
Nick Fox: I, I can make cameos for people. Just ca- sit at, sit at home like I'm a celebrity making cameo video. It's just, I joked about it last night on my, my Instagram story, and actually people were like, "Yes, yes, would pay.
Would pay money. Real money." I was like, "Okay." O- yeah, because I think it's, I think it's, I think it's one of those things where it's like people just, they, they, they... I'll give you an example. Sarah, my wife, she is incredibly smart person But what I've seen with her is people that have known her her whole life can't differentiate the [00:31:00] person that she was growing up with the brilliant woman she's become.
And as a result, sometimes the people that have been around the longest still treat her like she's a child.
Rachel Duncan: That's kinda what our families tend to do. They're, they're slow on the
Nick Fox: uptake.
Rachel Duncan: Yeah.
Nick Fox: And I don't know if this is something that's ... And you can speak to this, but do you think this is something that women experience more than men?
'Cause I've experienced it, don't, don't get me wrong. I have felt like i- in, with certain family members, "Oh, they've put me in this little box." Like, you've experienced it with employers, right? Everyone experiences it with an employer, like, "You stay in your lane. You stay in your role. We don't want you ... You, you, you stay right where you," you know.
But sometimes our, our parents do it, do it too, and I think that's what makes it sometimes harder to have a serious conversation with someone when it's like the roles are starting to change from, at least from, from me, from me being the, the, the child to me being the parent.
Rachel Duncan: Well, I think [00:32:00] stepping back, I actually, I, I think it's more of, like, a family dynamics thing than a gender thing, 'cause I think different families are different.
It's more about, like, how do different families handle boundaries? Yes. Um, you know, a family with rigid boundaries has a hard time updating. Like, "Well, no, you're the," you know, whatever. Like in my line of work, you know, people say, "Well, I'm the big spender." Well, hold, who told you that, right? It's like, oh, I have this role in my family, and I'd like to change that role, and it's difficult when I'm always seen as someone I was 10 years ago.
So that tends to be families with really rigid boundaries or sometimes super diffuse boundaries, and it actually a healthy ... Like, healthy boundaries are that I exist, you exist, my experience exists, your experience exists, and I'm seeing you in real time and allowing that to happen. So I think families that have healthy boundaries actually, like, track the maturity level of everybody, you know, maybe a little bit better.
And I think also what you're talking about, I think there's a name for it and I can't ... There's a term for this, but when ... You know, sort of the pref- parentification of the adult child [00:33:00] as our elders lose capacity. You know, whatever happens, aging is tough. You know, at what point we take our parents' keys. Mm.
I had to take my parents' keys at 38. And It is awkward Yeah It's very awkward. And, and it's tough 'cause, like, well, they're still your parents, but, like, they're actually less capable in the world than you are as more of a, like, the fully functioning adult. And I think first off, we don't talk about it enough, that it's a process.
Like, look, if any of us have living parents, like, these conversations are, are gonna have to happen where you might be the m- more, you know, quote, capable person in the room, and having to make some of these decisions or having to collaborate with them in a way that, like, they've been the boss. They've been the boss this whole time, you know?
And, like, especially, like, working financially, you are probably gonna have to be dealing with your parents' finances at some point. Have you ever talked with them about their finances?
Nick Fox: Will they let you talk, talk with them about their finan- Like, is that too big of a, a boundary for them, you know?
Rachel Duncan: Yeah. But [00:34:00] it has to start 'cause, like, just, like, the stuff we have, just, like, the 3,000 baseballs, like, you know, the elders, if they have, you know, money, assets, stuff like that, like, where is it gonna go?
You know, your kids are gonna have to deal with it. And it's, it's not a one conversation. It's many conversations, you know? But to start pulling in that support system now is, is gonna help that, like, inevitability when that does happen, yeah.
Nick Fox: Absolutely. It's, it's important to, I think, for parents to just encourage them to be open to those conversations, 'cause they are hard, you know?
No one, no one wants to think about when they're gonna die. We don't wanna think about when our parents are gonna die, but I'm gonna die. Do you know what I mean? Like, I'm g- Like, it would, like, they... It's almost taboo to talk about. I am going to die, you know?
Rachel Duncan: Death and taxes.
Nick Fox: There's, there's death and taxes.
Two, two certainties in life. Unless you're a [00:35:00] billionaire and you find a way to, you know, s- But that's neither here nor there. You got a really good accountant, and all your money's in stock, sure, okay, all of it. So I think that If parent, if parents are more open, and not only open, but proactive to having those conversations with their kids, I think we'll be a lot better off.
And with the impending transfer of stuff and wealth that we'll see in the next 20 years from baby boomers to millennials and Gen X as they start to go on to glory, I think that it's, it's even more important that we know in advance, like, "Hey, this is what's set up for you and your siblings." Because here's the thing.
If, if your parents are gonna wait until they're dead to have the conversation about who's getting what, right? Like, they're not gonna be around, so they don't really care, but that also doesn't give you a whole lot of room for negotiation [00:36:00] around things. And on top of that, it gives them an out for favorites.
Rachel Duncan: Mm. It can, yeah. I'll just keep it a secret. I'll keep it a secret till after I die and you guys deal with it. I mean, yeah, right, 'cause families are very complicated in that way. Um, yeah, absolutely. And I think it's a way to, like, avoid the uncomfortable conversation, and we don't, we don't want that, right?
We don't want that. But, like, can that get bridged? And there are people, like, there are estate lawyers who can help in this conversation. There are mediators who can help because, like, hey, if anyone listening to this feels like they have a dysfunctional family, like, you are not alone. It gets really complicated, especially when there's money, stuff, you know, meaning, identity all wrapped into it.
It can be really tricky. And there might not be one straightforward solution, but it's worth a conversation. Just like we were saying, like, you know, y- actually, we all have aligned interests probably in this. Yeah. What would you say, Nick? Like, I know you're kind of like, this whole thing has, has happened so quickly for you, and you have such [00:37:00] wisdom already.
If there was like, let's have two sort of bits of advice, like, one is for maybe the older generation who does have a large collection of things, and then another message to the- their adult children who are probably gonna have to be managing these things. Is there-- Are there, like, two, two-pronged advice you would give to these segments?
Nick Fox: Yeah. So, like, all right, so first to the older generation, be open and proactive to conversations about estates now. Consider Swedish death cleaning as a barometer for how you can move forward in your life. Between now and the end of your life, it's your opportunity to have as many experiences as, as you wanna have.
You had your opportunities to collect. You've had your opportunities to have your things, to have that comfort. Consider Stepping outside of your comfort zone in some way, shape, or form. That's the first thing to, to them. And to the, to the millennials and to the, the, the people that want to [00:38:00] have the conversation with mom and dad, it's as simple as starting from a vantage point of curiosity rather than combativeness, and wanting to let them know that we're curious about how they have lived.
We wanna know about the stories behind the stuff that they have. It's just we may not have the time or the resources that they had in order to house some of the things that they may want us or expect us to house whenever they pass away. So that's, I think A good barometer or a good starting point for everyone
Rachel Duncan: Yeah.
Yeah. This is tender stuff. I
Nick Fox: mean, it'd be great if it was stocks and bonds and like, don't get me wrong, right? But, like, it's more than likely we're, we're, we're not starting the conversation about that. It's about the stuff.
Rachel Duncan: Yeah. Right. Right. And there's value to them. I think [00:39:00] there's kind of a truism that we value our own things probably more than we value other people's, and it goes both ways.
And to just be really sensitive about that, yeah, like with my mom when I was trying to help her declutter, and at a certain point she just said, "I just like being surrounded by my things because it reminds me of how I used to be." I was like, "Okay, backing up." You know, I was like, "You have all this art, so if you don't use it, other people could really use it.
It's really cluttering up my house." And she said, "I know I don't make art anymore, but I just wanna be around it." So at a certain point I just had to back off, you know? Like, this is just important to her. And, and then I also noticed, I'm like, okay, some shadow work. Like, yeah, I've got musical instruments I don't play anymore, and like, but I want them to be around me because they remind me of my love of music.
So I was like, okay, I, I see it, I see it.
Nick Fox: What instrument?
Rachel Duncan: I have... Well, I play guitar, and I tinker with lots of stuff. But, like, I have a mandolin I haven't touched, I have an electric guitar I haven't touched that I had played in college, and they are just sitting there and I'm like, "Hmm, [00:40:00] pot calling kettle black here."
Nick Fox: Yo, I, I mean, ye- yes and no. You know, we all have things that we collect, and I think that's something that we need to acknowledge. I've got vinyl in my house, most of which is from record labels sending me vinyl and my mother-in-law sending me vinyl that she had, or my wife's dad, who passed on, sadly. And so we all have stuff that we, we collect and we hang onto, and I think that there are reasons for why we, we hang onto them, whether it's reminding us about someone that we used to be or a different time, a nostalgia in your life, or maybe even, even reminds you of a person, you know?
And then there's, you know, undiagnosed mental health conditions too, that, like, we could talk about all day, you know? And I think the more I learn from the community and through experience about things like hoarding and how they're, how hoarding is connected to OCD and, like, there... It's like, oh, you start to weave this tapestry of, of different [00:41:00] mental conditions and, and your family and your friends, and you start to see, like, these, these patterns emerge.
And while I'm not qualified to diagnose anybody, I am smart enough to be able to say, "Maybe there's, maybe there's something there." You know?
Rachel Duncan: There's a little more to it. Yeah, I'm actually really bro- glad you brought up hoarding. And, and I don't know a lot about it, but I've actually heard a sp- a, a therapist who specializes in hoarding disorder.
And, you know, it really is a real thing. I also don't think it's a term we should throw around lightly. Like, true hoarding is at the point where someone cannot even function in their space or their space has become dangerous. So I just wanna, like, put it out there. You know, your full basement is not a hoarding disorder.
And, and there are professionals, and it is not a case of just getting rid of it. That's not what's happening here. And yeah, it's a, it is an anxiety disorder. And maybe also we all kind of understand it a little bit 'cause all disorders are on a spectrum, right, of, like, these things are ... You know, I don't know much about the world, but this [00:42:00] feels, this feels solid and real.
Like, we have a little bit of that. And, and, like, I think you mentioned actually in one of your videos about, you know, generations that have gone through war and strife and tough stuff. Also a time when things like clothing were very expensive. And the generation that has lived through this life where their, the cost of goods has gone down and down and down.
Like, things like clothing used to be incredibly expensive, for example, and now it's ... Clothing's never been cheaper as it is now. And then if you come from, you know, this intergenerational trauma of, you know, being unhoused or, you know, forced migration and things like that, then it really makes sense. I'm gonna hold onto what I have.
But then lo and behold, here comes consumerism and Walmart and you know, and it just fuels that fire of, of that need to feel secure. So from a mental health standpoint, it's actually really understandable and, like, we can see the logic of how these basements and garages have gotten just packed to the gills.
Nick Fox: Indeed. It's interesting. I do get a lot of people [00:43:00] accusing relatives of hoarding just by sending me their photos and it's like a full garage. I'm like, "Nope, sorry, that's not hoarding." You know? Be like, "Uh, I- I'm not someone that can diagnose that at all. But I can tell you looking at that garage, that's not an example of that."
"But it's so much stuff." And I'm like, "Yes, it is so much stuff."
Rachel Duncan: It's a lot of stuff. Let's name it what it is. It's a lot of stuff.
Nick Fox: Is there trash on the floor, you know? Is there fecal matter everywhere? The, this is when it starts to get more, more, more layered. And I'm not saying that that's for every hoarder either.
Obviously, I'm not ... Again, I'm not qualified to make those determinations. But yeah, we, we, we have to be careful. You know, I have to be careful about mentioning autism now because it's interesting. For a long time And, and it seems like the word tism itself is so kind of thrown around now by our generation on the side of like, well, we're, we're starting to realize that ADHD was sometimes [00:44:00] AUHD, and then this, that, you know, that...
And then I'm start- like, I've started to realize personal things about myself and about my family medical history that I look at now and I'm like, "Oh, there may be a little bit of tism in me." And, and it's always around if I have to break my routine, I have a come apart. And so one of the most common c- the reason I bring this up is not to trigger anyone with autism, but is to say that one of the most common comments that I see in my page is, "Oh, but they say autism didn't exist back in our day."
And, uh, to that I say, "RFK doesn't watch my videos, you guys."
Rachel Duncan: Yet.
Nick Fox: But it, it is calling out something that I think that we're all feeling. It's that a lot of us Go through our day-to-day now wondering about our own mental wellbeing more than we ever did, and we're trying to rationalize certain behaviors [00:45:00] by trying to find a diagnosis that we're not qualified to give.
And that's the thing I think that we're, we're seeing a lot more. So I've tried to ratchet back my use of the word tism in any videos, even if it's just me being self-deprecating, because I wanna be respectful of those people that, uh, I don't want them to, to be offended, you know? And, and I think that we all need to be a little bit more cognizant of how we talk about it.
Rachel Duncan: Absolutely. And there's so much self-diagnosis and, you know, my opinion on self-di- on diagnosis in general from the mental health world, like is it problematic? Yes. Can it be very useful? Yes. And so where I sit is a diagnosis is useful if it's useful. Is this useful information for you to navigate getting services, getting prescriptions, stuff like that?
Is it useful to find other people who share a similar struggle? Great. But, you know, yeah, and I sometimes wonder about like over-identifying with this stuff. And then also, yeah, when it comes to hoarding or [00:46:00] OCD or, you know, these things that we might wanna like diagnose the members of our family, you know, based on the stuff they have, let's just like slow our horses here.
Whether or not there's a diagnosis, it's just so important that compassion comes first. And I'll find some resources and I'll, I'll put in the show notes just about, about hoarding disorder to understand that and like, and where to seek some help with that 'cause it's a very, it is, it's a very tender thing.
Well, Nick, this was such a delight to talk with you and, and oh, you know, there's one other PSA I want you to give, which is checking lead in ceramics. Uh-huh. I actually was stopped in my tracks when I saw that on your profile. Could you share with us?
Nick Fox: Yeah. So it's not, again, wasn't on my bingo card when I started doing these videos, but the second or third video I did was from a girl from...
She's a nurse in Memphis. Her screen name that she has is The Butthole Sommelier. Can't make this stuff up. She's great. She's really good at what she does Anyway, the reason why she reached out was because she had lead [00:47:00] dishes and stuff that was made with cadmium, and the handle was made of, like, water buffalo or something like, like, really, like, why would you kill the water...
You know, all this stuff. The, the issue is a lot of the ceramics that are in the thrift haven't been tested for lead exposure. And we didn't realize that some of these were actually made with lead in the glaze. So the more ornate the dishware, sometimes the worse the possibility is. Desert Rose China is a very common pattern, but it's also notorious for lead.
And so there are people on social media that, uh, actually do a really good job with covering this topic. So you can find, like, uh, I wanna say Lead Mama, and, like, there's the Lead Guy. And anyway, there's tons of people on social media [00:48:00] that kind of bring this to the forefront and talk about it on, you know, what to do.
So before you go touching your inherited dishware, just know that sometimes you need to get it checked for anything that, anything that could be harmful to you if you ever ate off of it.
Rachel Duncan: Yeah.
Nick Fox: Right.
Rachel Duncan: Or pass it along, right? Don't, let's not be donating, you know, stuff with lead in it to the, to the thrift, 'cause they're not checking that.
Yeah. Yeah. I, I really appreciate that PSA. Nick, let us know, how can we follow you and your work?
Nick Fox: Yeah. I am @nickfoxradio on all social medias. I also recently acquired @millennialinheritance on all social media, too, so that way no one would squat on it. That'll probably be my long-form podcast at some point.
And I've saved @millennialinheritance for all the podcast platforms as well. I even put a, a holding episode in there so that eventually I can... So if, if someone comes across the, they're like, "This [00:49:00] better be Nick and not somebody else stealing his stuff." So yeah, that's, that's me. So tho- those are the two places you can find me.
Rachel Duncan: I really look forward to just more content and more insights as the thing just continues to grow. I think, yeah, I keep saying, like, you've just really touched a nerve, and I think something we just have not been talking about enough. And I really appreciate you coming on the show.
Nick Fox: Thank you for having me.
I appreciate it.
Rachel Duncan: Well, guess what? You are now the kind of person who listens to a money podcast. Congratulations. If this episode landed for you, if, if it opened you up to a new way of thinking about money, I'd love for you to rate and review the show wherever you listen. Apple reviews are especially helpful, though.
Those reviews really do make a difference. They help other people find these conversations, and honestly, it may even be a small but meaningful step in your own money journey to say, "Yes, I [00:50:00] listen to a money podcast, and this is a good one." Or maybe even, "I'm not the kind of person who listens to money podcasts, and this is a good one."
We are also always looking for new listener questions and stories to feature on an upcoming episode. Go to moneyhealingclub.com/podcast and scroll down to the big orange Record button. I wanna hear your question or story. And if you're looking to get more support on your money journey, there's lots of other financial therapy things happening at moneyhealingclub.com, from group programs to courses to events and working one-on-one with me.
You don't have to do this alone. Thank you to Sydney Harbosky at sydneyharbosky.com for production support. We are also a proud member of the Feminist Podcasters Collective, where creators like me are building podcasts to build a better world together. I will see you next time