Collectibles in Your Florida Estate Plan

If you are fond of finding just the right kind of collectibles to keep in your home, there may be some specific issues you will need to think about when creating your estate plan. Building a collection can be a rewarding pastime, but when it comes time to distribute your property after you are gone, dealing with a collectibles collection can be a bit of a challenge. They were one to take a look at some common issues that people who have collectibles in Florida need to think about when creating an estate plan.

Collectibles in Your Florida Estate Plan. Valuation

How much is your collection worth? How much did you pay for it when you acquired it? How much could you get if you decided to sell the collection today? How much could you get if you decide to sell in 10 years from now, or 20?

The question of placing a value on any collectible or collection is not always easy to answer. Just like anything else, collectibles can increase and decrease in value over time, and can sometimes do so unexpectedly.

Take, for example, collectibles that were popular back in the 1990s, such as Beanie Babies and Longabrger baskets. Back then, there were a lot of people interested in these collectibles, and prices for individual items skyrocketed. However, the interest in both of these items waned significantly, and today they are only worth a fraction of what they were at the peak of their popularity.

Contrast that with vintage typewriters. Back in the 90s a lot of people were simply throwing away typewriters because the widespread adoption of personal computers made these old pieces of technology obsolete. Today, on the other hand, there is a growing trend with many young people looking for vintage typewriters to both collect and use. Typewriters that may have been worth almost nothing 25 years ago can today be worth hundreds of dollars each.

Collectibles in Your Florida Estate Plan. Inheritance Desires

While you might love your collectibles, does your family feel the same way? It’s probably unlikely that your children or grandchildren share your passion for your collectibles. Even if some of them do share your same interests, it’s unlikely that all of them do. In this respect, distributing collectibles as tangible inheritances after you are gone is not typically a good option. In many situations, people with valuable collections will often need to make arrangements to have those collections liquidated before or after they die so that they can distribute the funds as inheritances, instead of the collectibles themselves.

Beyond that, if there are any emotional or sentimental values attached to any of the collectible you have, you may need to make special arrangements for those individual pieces when you develop an estate plan.