Clearing a home after a death

Why the order decides everything

There is one irreversible act in this whole process and it is the first one most families perform: putting things in a van before anyone has written down what was there. Everything else can be undone. A decision to keep can be reversed next year. A decision to sell can be regretted and lived with. An empty house cannot be un-emptied, and the record that should have been made in it cannot be made afterwards.

Three separate things depend on that record, and they surface at three different times. The estate's accounting needs it now. The tax basis of anything an heir keeps needs it whenever that heir eventually sells, which may be a decade away. And a family disagreement needs it at the moment somebody asks a question nobody can now answer.^{Source 1Source 4}

If you are the executor or administrator, this is not tidiness. You are personally accountable for what left the house and what it was worth, and the person you will be accounting to may be a sibling, a creditor or a court.

The good news is the part nobody says out loud: there is no deadline. Nothing in the law requires a house to be emptied by a date. The deadlines families feel are real but they belong to somebody else — a sale that has been agreed, a lease that ends, a mortgage still accruing, a reverse mortgage on a regulated clock. If none of those applies to you, the correct pace is slower than the one you are being pushed into.

Keep, sell, donate, discard — and what actually decides

Every object in the house is going to one of four places, and families lose weeks because they try to decide all four at once for every object. Sort into the four first and refine later; a wrong call in the sell pile can be pulled back out, a wrong call in the discard pile cannot.

What decides is rarely money. It is worth saying plainly, because a valuation exercise makes everything look like a financial decision and most of this is not one. Keep is for the things somebody actually wants — and the test is whether a named person wants it, not whether it seems a shame to let it go. Sell is for things with a market: furniture in current styles, tools, machinery, jewellery, anything collected deliberately. Donate is for things with use but no market, which is most of a house. Discard is for the rest, and there is more of it than anybody expects.

The single most useful question, and the one that ends most arguments: is there a named person who wants this? Not "would somebody want this" — a named person. Almost nothing survives it, and what does survive it is the part of the house that mattered.

Two traps are worth naming. The first is the assumption that old means valuable; most household furniture from the second half of the twentieth century has almost no resale market and a family that stores it for a year has paid more than it will ever fetch. The second is the opposite error — clearing something genuinely valuable because it did not look it. That is what the valuation step is for, and it comes first for that reason.

What it is worth, and when somebody else has to say so

Fair market value has a definition and it is not the one families use. It is what a member of the public would pay at retail for the item or a comparable one — expressly not a forced-sale price, and expressly not the price in a market other than the one the item is most commonly sold in to the public. What an estate-sale company will clear a house for is therefore not the measure, and neither is what a dealer would offer.^{Source 2}

The date is fixed and it is the date of death. That single day sets both the estate's position and what the property cost the person who inherits it, which is why writing it down now is worth more than it looks: appreciation during the deceased person's lifetime is not taxed to the heir, and only movement after that date is a gain.^{Source 1Source 4}

How much formality the contents actually need is more forgiving than most people fear, until one threshold is crossed. A room-by-room itemization is what the regulation asks for, and things in the same room worth under a hundred dollars each may be grouped rather than listed individually. But where the articles of marked artistic or intrinsic value come to more than three thousand dollars in total — the regulation names jewellery, furs, silverware, paintings, antiques, books, oriental rugs, coin and stamp collections — an expert appraisal under oath is required. The threshold is aggregate, not per item, which is the part families get wrong.^{Source 3}

If you sell something inherited soon after the death, the gain is still taxed at long-term rates. A family selling quickly is not penalized for it.^{Source 5}

For most estates the practical answer is a phone camera and an afternoon: photograph each room in sequence, open the drawers and photograph those too, and write a list with a value beside each line. That is a defensible record. Bring in an appraiser where the three-thousand-dollar line is anywhere near, where a single object might be worth several thousand, or where an heir has said out loud that they doubt a number.

Donating, and what a deduction actually requires

Start with the part nobody selling you a cleanout will mention: most families emptying a house will take the standard deduction and get precisely nothing for the donation. That does not make donating wrong — it is the right destination for most of a house — but it makes the paperwork pointless for the majority, and worth doing exactly right for the minority who will itemize.

For anyone who will itemize, the requirements are procedural rather than financial and they are easy to fail after the fact. A donation of two hundred and fifty dollars or more buys no deduction at all without a written acknowledgment from the charity — and it must be obtained before the return is filed or its due date, whichever is earlier. Chasing a receipt in March for a van-load given away in July is usually too late.^{Source 6}

The charity describes what it received. It does not value it. A receipt with a number the charity wrote is not evidence of that number — putting a value on the sofa is the donor's job.^{Source 6}

Above five hundred dollars of donated property the return has to describe it. Above five thousand a qualified appraisal is required, and above five hundred thousand the appraisal itself is attached. The thresholds are on the deduction claimed rather than on any single object — which is exactly the case when a household of ordinary furniture goes in one trip, and is why the total is worth knowing before the van leaves rather than after.^{Source 7}

One practical note that saves a repeat trip: many charities will not take upholstered furniture, mattresses, cots, or anything with a fabric surface they cannot certify, and most will not take opened food, medicines or chemicals at all. Ask before loading rather than after.

What must not be thrown away

A house being cleared is a frequent place an estate loses something it cannot replace. None of the following is obvious in a skip: the original will, if it has not already been found; deeds and title documents; vehicle titles; insurance policies, including small paid-up policies bought decades ago; savings bonds and share certificates; military discharge papers, which unlock burial benefits; and the last several years of tax returns, which the final return and any estate return both lean on.^{Source 8}

Then there is the category that is not a document at all: anything with an account number on it. A statement from a bank nobody knew about, a policy schedule, a pension letter, a membership card — these are how a family finds the accounts that will otherwise sit unclaimed for years. Keep every piece of paper with a company name and a number on it until somebody has worked through them.

The paper you throw away is also the paper somebody else can use. A cleared house generates kerbside rubbish full of account numbers and a Social Security number, at exactly the moment the death has been published and the person can no longer notice. Shred rather than bin, and do it before the clearance rather than during it.

Firearms are their own problem and not a household object at all: an ordinary handover to the wrong person can be a federal offense, and the page on that is linked below. Prescription medicines have their own disposal route and should not go in a bin either. Neither is a clearance company's job.