Meet Margaret

Meet Margaret Warner. 

She’s got a warm presence and a wicked sense of humor. Margaret joined our team just a couple of months ago, and while the title in her email signature is Senior Specialist, those two words encompass a whole range of activities, projects, and specialties she brings to the team. With decades of experience in estate sales, and the monumental experience of coordinating her own parents’ downsizing process, Margaret has a passion for making late-in-life transitions as smooth as possible for her clients.

Along with her work in real estate and estate sales, Margaret has expanded her network of senior care providers, and built an online community where local advisors and trusted vendors collaborate to support her vision. The vision of a Whatcom County community that truly cares for our aging population, and has all the resources to facilitate the changes and decisions that they are making - decisions about housing, about medical care, about estate planning, and about decades’ worth of possessions.

One of the first times I talked with Margaret at length, the discussion turned to life-changing moments - that story that you look back on as life-changing, even though it didn’t seem so at the moment. She told me this story, and I share it with you as a window into her backstory:  

Baseball cards

"These cards were old - not the type in bubblegum wrappers, 

but from tobacco tins: the early era of this piece of American history." 

The summer before her senior year in highschool, Margaret discovered a box of baseball cards in her family home basement. They were not your run of the mill cards - these were printed with dates back to 1887. 

One day, (without any adult supervision) Margaret took the box of cards to a card show in nearby Littleton, and picked a dealer that appeared reputable. She told me that as soon as the dealer saw the types of cards she had:

“He was by my side quicker than you could say baseball.”

Thankfully the dealer she had picked did in fact turn out to be a respectable person. He advised the young Margaret to take her cards, buy three specific books on appraising baseball cards, and go home and research each card prior to coming back - this time with her parents.

And finally,

“You should probably go and put those cards in a safe place.”

For the rest of the summer, Margaret pored over these references guides for hours each night. She sorted the collection into large albums and categorized them by condition. These cards were old - not the type in bubblegum wrappers, but from tobacco tins: the early era of this piece of Americana. Some were dated from the 1880s.  

Finally, she finishied appraising them to the best of her ability. Now was the time to go back to her parents, and present her findings: 

"the forgotten shoebox was worth nearly $15,000." 

But the story doesn’t end there. Eventually the collection was sold to a dealer, and Margaret chose to use the funds to spend a year and a half in Italy, studying art and Italian. She speaks of this season in her life as the time that made her into the woman she is today.