Horological Meandering

Zhege
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Leaving our watches behind - preparing our heirs

There is a post on the Patek forum, "Patek Inheritance" from descartes1, which raises some thought provoking questions - and also has a lovely story from Whit.  There are certain emotional issues that we have to deal with as individuals (which watch to leave to whom, and will they really appreciate them...) and draw our own conclusions. 

However, the fact is that many of our watches have significant value, and trusting on fate that our heirs will randomly find an honest broker like Whit is probably not the best plan    My wife knows about the value (or, least, how much was spent...) of the key pieces, but my kids not so much.  While I hope that they might want to keep some as family heirlooms (just as I have my Dad's 80s Seiko quartz, and my Uncle Fred's 1920s pocketwatch), they might want to sell them to fund (hopefully) worthwhile projects of their own.  But while they might be happy to sell a Patek Annual Calendar containing and ounce of two of gold for $5,000 - that's not a good legacy, to allow them to lose the value of what they have because they have no idea what it is worth.

So I've prepared an excel workbook, with a page for each watch with the information included in the picture below.  A hardcopy is stored with other financial and important papers.  Each page has closeups of the watch (so if can be identified by a non-WIS).  This sort of thing is useful for any sort of valuable objects (art, antiques, coins, etc etc) whose worth is not obvious to the untrained eye.  It also has contact information of individuals and dealers that I consider trustworthy people to deal with.  I keep it up to date and include info on watches that have been sold, so no one will wonder "what ever happened that one".  We almost lost some jewelry from my Mother's estate, but having a written list kept us looking until all was accounted for (including the little bag in the middle of old towels and bedsheets in the rags pile - such high security!).  It wasn't very valuable, but not the sort of thing you want to wind up in the trash!

While I hope to keep enjoying my watches for quite some time, I want to make sure that if my children don't want the watches, they are at least able to recapture a reasonable amount of value from them.  I hope this is helpful for my Purist friends!