How to divvy up your family belongings peacefully and sensibly

Dear Savvy Senior,

What’s the best way to distribute my personal possessions to my kids after I’m gone without causing hard feelings or conflict? I have a lot of jewelry, art, family heirlooms and antique furniture and three grown kids that don’t always see eye to eye on things.

Planning Ahead

Dear Planning,

Divvying up personal possessions among adult children or other loved ones can often be a difficult task. Deciding who should get what without showing favoritism, hurting someone’s feelings or causing a feud can be difficult, even for close-knit families who enter the process with the best of intentions. Here are a few tips to consider that can help you divide your stuff with minimal conflict.

Problem areas

For starters, you need to be aware that it’s usually the small, simple items of little monetary value that cause the most conflict. This is because the value we attach to the small personal possessions is usually sentimental or emotional and because the simple items are the things that most families fail to talk about.

Family battles also can escalate over whether things are being divided fairly by monetary value. So for items of higher value like your jewelry, antiques and art, consider getting an appraisal to assure fair distribution. To locate an appraiser, see www.Appraisers.org or www.AppraisersAssociation.org.

Ways to divvy

The best solution for passing along your personal possessions is for you to go through your house with your kids or other heirs either separately or all at once. Open up cabinets, drawers and closets and go through boxes in the attic and/or basement to find out which items they would like to inherit and why. They may have some emotional attachment to something you’re not aware of. If more than one child wants the same thing, you will have the ultimate say.

Then you need to sit down and make a list of who gets what on paper, signed, dated and referenced in your will. You can revise it anytime you want. You also may want to consider writing an additional letter or create an audio or video recording that further explains your intentions.

You can specify a strategy for divvying up the rest of your property. Here are some methods that are fair and reasonable:

Take turns choosing: Use a round-robin process where your kids take turns choosing the items they would like to have. If who goes first becomes an issue, they can always flip a coin, draw straws or roll dice. Also, to help simplify things, break down the dividing process room by room versus tackling the entire house. To keep track of who gets what, either make a list or use adhesive dots with a color assigned to each person to tag the item.