What to Do With Papers and Photos Before an Estate Sale

Why the papers come first

An estate sale company will sort, price and sell the contents of a house, and it will set aside papers it finds, but it will not go through them for you, and it should not: the will, the bank statements and the letters are the family's business. Anything left in a drawer on sale day is, in practice, for sale with the drawer. So the papers are the one job that has to be done before the company starts, and it is best done before anything at all is moved, donated or thrown away.

There are three reasons to do it first rather than last. The estate cannot be settled without certain documents, and the sooner they are found the sooner everything else can begin. The papers contain money, in the form of accounts, policies, bonds and often cash, that the family does not know about. And the papers are where the identity of the person lives, in the sense a thief means: account numbers, a Social Security number, a signature, a mother's maiden name. A dead person's identity is stolen more easily than a living one's, because nobody is watching the accounts. This is the reason the shredding section below is not optional.

The guides to preparing a house for an estate sale and what not to do before a sale both put the papers at the top of the list, and this guide is the long version of that item.

Where the important papers hide

Start with the obvious places: the desk, the filing cabinet, the safe, the box in the closet marked “important.” Then keep going, because a lifetime of papers is never all in one place, and the generation now leaving houses behind grew up hiding things.

Tell whoever helps you sort, and tell the company, the one rule: nothing with a name, a number or a signature on it goes in the trash or the sale until a family member has looked at it. Companies that do this every week will set aside a “family box” without being asked; ask anyway. In a house where papers are everywhere, the guide to estate sales in a hoarded home describes how a crew works through it in layers.

What to find first

Not every paper matters equally, and the ones that settle the estate matter most. Look for these first, in roughly this order, and put them in one folder that goes home with you tonight:

1. The will, a trust, and any letter of instruction. Sometimes there is more than one; keep every version and let the attorney sort out which governs.
2. The deed to the house, and titles to vehicles, boats and anything else registered.
3. Bank, brokerage and retirement account statements, including the ones from institutions nobody knew about. Unopened mail is where these are found.
4. Life insurance policies, and homeowner's and auto policies, which need to stay in force while the house is being cleared and sold.
5. Tax returns, the last several years, which list every account that paid interest.
6. Savings bonds, stock certificates and pension paperwork, which are money in a form easy to mistake for old paper.
7. Birth, marriage, divorce and death certificates, military discharge papers, passports, Social Security cards. Several of these will be asked for, in the original, by someone official.
8. The safe deposit box key and anything saying which bank it belongs to.
9. Passwords and account lists, which many people kept in a notebook by the computer or in the back of an address book.
10. Prepaid funeral arrangements, a cemetery deed, and organ donor or advance directive documents, if the death has just happened or is expected.

If you are the executor, these are the documents the court and the beneficiaries will ask about, and the guide to an executor's guide to personal property explains where the contents of the house fit in your duties. Rules vary by state, and this guide is general guidance, not legal advice; the attorney handling the estate will tell you what your state requires.

What to keep, and for how long

Once the estate-settling papers are in their folder, what remains is a judgment about ordinary records. The table gives the usual guidance; how long any particular record must be kept for tax purposes depends on the situation and the state, and the estate's tax professional is the person to ask.

Two records from the estate sale itself go in the keep column: the contract with the company, and the settlement statement showing what sold and for how much. The guide to estate sale records and what to keep explains why, and for how long. Whatever you keep, put it in one labeled box or scan it, and write on the box who has it; six months from now a sibling will need something from it.

What to shred, and how

Everything with a name and a number on it that you are not keeping gets shredded, not recycled and not bagged for the curb. That includes the pile of pre-approved credit offers, which can be used to open an account in the deceased's name; the checkbooks and the box of unused checks; old statements; prescription labels and medical paperwork; the address labels on catalogs; expired driver's licenses and cards; and anything carrying a Social Security number.

A home shredder will manage a drawer. It will not manage forty years, and it will burn out trying. For a house's worth of paper, a shredding service is the practical answer: some office supply stores and shipping shops charge by the pound, mobile shredding trucks will come to the house and shred on the spot, and many communities and banks run free shredding days a few times a year. Boxes of paper can also go to a shredding company's drop-off. Ask for a certificate of destruction if the estate's attorney wants one.

Keep the paper to be shredded in a room that is closed during the sale, or better, out of the house entirely, and take it to the shredder before the sale opens. A box marked “shred” in a house full of strangers is a box that reads “take me.”

The photographs

The photographs are the part families put off, because they are the part that hurts. There is no right way to do them, but there is a practical order that keeps them safe while the rest of the house is cleared:

1. Gather them all into one place first, without sorting: albums, frames, shoeboxes, the envelopes from the drugstore, the slides, the home movies, the ones in the desk and the ones in the Bible. Take the frames' pictures out if the frames are going in the sale, and check the back of every frame; photographs and papers were often tucked behind the mount.
2. Take them out of the house. The photographs are the one category that should never be in the house on sale day, whatever else is. Put the boxes in a car or at a sibling's.
3. Sort later, together, and slowly. A kitchen table, a few weekends, the siblings who want to be there. Label what you can while the people who know the faces are in the room. The guide to what to keep for family memories is about this part of the job.
4. Scan what matters and share the scans. It ends arguments over who gets the originals, and it means a flood or a house fire does not take the only copy.

Some photographs will be of nobody anyone recognizes, and some families are at peace with letting those go. Which brings up a question that surprises people: buyers at estate sales do want old photographs, and it is legitimate that they do.

What buyers legitimately want, and what they must not have

There is a real market for old paper, and the people who buy it are not ghouls. Collectors, decorators, artists, local historians, genealogists and dealers all buy what the trade calls ephemera, and a house that has stood for sixty years has plenty of it. Selling it is a reasonable choice, and in some cases it is a service: the town historical society may want the photographs of Main Street more than the family does.

Things buyers look for, at prices that depend on age, condition and local interest:

• Old photographs of nobody in particular: cabinet cards, tintypes, studio portraits, snapshots from the early and mid twentieth century, especially of cars, shops, uniforms, sports teams and street scenes. Unidentified faces are not a problem for these buyers; they are the point.
• Postcards, letters and envelopes with stamps and postmarks, particularly from before the Second World War, and anything written from a war.
• Maps, brochures, travel folders, matchbooks, menus, tickets and programs.
• Manuals and catalogs for cars, tools, appliances and machinery, which restorers hunt for.
• Recipe boxes and handwritten recipe cards, which people buy and use.
• Vintage magazines, comics and newspapers with a notable date or cover.
• Diaries, ledgers and scrapbooks, for their handwriting and their glimpse of a life, as long as they are old enough that nobody in them is alive.
• Military paperwork and memorabilia from a generation ago, though many families rightly keep these, and a veteran's discharge papers are an identity document that stays with the family regardless.

What must not reach the sale floor, in any form, is anything that identifies a living person or an open account: identification cards, checks, statements, insurance and medical records, employment records, anything with a Social Security number, and recent photographs of living family members, including children, in a form that names them. Recent letters and diaries are a family decision, and the default should be to keep them out. When in doubt, take it out of the house; a buyer never misses what was not there. The guide to hidden value and overlooked treasures has more on the paper and small things that turn out to be worth something.

Computers, phones and the digital papers

A computer, a tablet, a phone and an external drive are documents, in the sense that matters here. They hold tax returns, bank logins, passwords saved in the browser, scanned certificates, email going back years and every photograph taken since the film ran out. Selling one with its drive in it is selling all of that, and wiping the desktop to the recycle bin does not remove it.

Before any device is sold or donated: get into it if you can, using the password list you found in the desk; copy off the photographs and documents to a drive the family keeps; note the accounts and subscriptions it reveals, which the executor will need to close; then either remove the storage drive and keep or destroy it, or have the device wiped properly with the manufacturer's reset for a phone or a full disk erase for a computer. A device you cannot get into is kept, not sold. The same applies to cameras with memory cards, old phones in the drawer, and the box of floppy disks and CDs, which are cheap to keep and impossible to check on the day.

What to do next

Spend the first day in the house on the papers alone: the estate-settling folder first, then the shredding boxes, then the photographs into the car. With those three things out of the house, everything else can be priced, sold or given away without fear, and the guide to preparing the house picks up from there. When you are ready to talk to someone about the sale itself, describe the estate once and local estate sale companies will reach out to you, free; tell them the papers are done, and they will know what that means.

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