Houston Estate Planning and Elder Law Attorney Blog
It may take some expert help to work out how to pass the pieces to your heirs. Parents' collectibles can hold emotional meaning for adult children, and some collections carry financial value as well.
Estate planning is all about deciding how to dispose of your assets, but when it comes to assets, collections can be fairly problematic. After all, the reason it’s a “collection” is because the whole is worth something greater than the sum of its parts. You simply don’t have an unrelated list of items that you can just casually split up (or do you?). Kiplinger recently explored this challenge in an article titled “Leaving a Collection to Your Heirs.”
The fundamental question is this: what is your hope for your collection? Does the collection live on, and if so, under who’s watch? You might want the collection to stay together or to stay in the family for generations. This commonly is the case when the items are family relics or antiques. In addition, collectible assets can raise other vexing issues like possible taxation or even legal difficulties (an exotic gun collection, for example).