How to Avoid Family Estate Conflict with The VHS System

Daniel Glazier explains his VHS system for identifying the items most likely to cause family conflict: valuable, heirloom and sentimental.

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Dealing with the actual families and you’re getting involved prior to death and you’re consulting with them, you’re walking them through systems.

A lot of times there’s huge sentimental value associated with certain items, and a lot of those same items are coveted by more than one family member. How do you instruct them to work through all of this to assign values when you’ve got, again, memories playing a role, emotions playing a role, how do you walk through that minefield?

I saw there was a problem and, I was like, okay, what are the problem items? Because if every, the, any given house there’s thousands and thousands of items. But it comes down to 10, 20, 30 items usually. But what are those items? So I came up with a system, and I call it VHS, the VHS system.

It’s the most valuable items. Your family heirlooms and the sentimental items. And that the most valuable. It’s obvious because of the money. Like if you have a painting worth $10,000, of course everyone, oh, we want that painting. They don’t want it because it’s a family, you know, family heirloom, they want it ’cause it’s worth $10,000.

Let’s be realistic. But, so the valuable stuff is definitely you gotta, you know, list and the most valuable stuff and the family heirlooms, that’s usually the person that it’s been passed down. There’s some kind of family history attached to it, the sentimental items, what’s hard about sentimental items is we don’t always know what’s sentimental cause we have things that are sentimental to us. But something else might be sentimental that we think, you know, we’re gonna throw out or or, no one’s gonna care about. And those are the items we have to identify cause those are the items that can cause, cause a lot of the problems in a family.

So that’s the VHS system. It’s a system where you organize, where you inventory all these items and then you make a list and then you, you, really look through the list. And then, you know, you narrow it down once you realize, you know, maybe that isn’t that valuable, that family heirloom, I could tell no one’s gonna want it, the sentimental items.

But when you get to the sentimental items, you really have to have conversations with your family. You really do. You know, and it could be something as simple as. What items do I have? I’m thinking, um, a good way to put this, I read this, uh, yesterday, is to say, I’m thinking of downsizing all my stuff. Is there anything here that you would like?

You know, and then it, and it could be very surprising when it’s a pen, you know, a pen maybe that you signed report cards with, or it could be very basic things, but you, it’s important to identify those things.