No Longer A Collector

I have probably been to several 100 estate sales. One thing that seems abundantly clear is that kids don't want their parents crap.

Ask any of your non PM friends what they would do if they inherited coins or PM. Dollar to donuts they haven't a clue as to how to sell it. Not that selling is that complicated but it does requires some knowledge.

We had to liquidate my father in laws assets and a lot of stuff was thrown out .No one wanted to take the time to market it properly .It was a very sobering experience . So I have sold off a lot of stuff that I believe I would not use as much anymore. I trimmed my collectables down to coins that still interested me and moved the money into bullion .With what is left we left papers giving values and where and how to market them for the best value . I also expressed our hope that they would keep some of the bullion for their own safety. (We have also listed all our assets ,subscriptions ,bank accounts and co-op equity so they have a list to work with.

I find historical coinage fascinating. I'm just learning some about it. I was a History major and its always been my passion tho somehow I never learned much about coins. And coinciding with the advances in the human timeline are the advances of economics and coinage.

Its as important as the development of agriculture and/or language.

This has been my experience with collectibles.  Long post so skip to the end for lessons I've learned or skip altogether if you have no interest.

Whether collectibles are a good idea is only clear in hindsight and only after a considerable amount of time.

I bought a lot of Pokemon cards in 2000 because my son played the game.  I avoided selling the cards until last year because it is actually work, and I decided to sell a lot of stuff to avoid saddling the kids with the chore.  Last year I sold almost $20k worth and have another 1/2 to go.  Good that I've waited all these years but bad now that ebay has reporting.  That Pokemon has done OK is only clear in hindsight.  I could have bought Beanie Babies.

I dabbled in art maybe 40-50 years ago.  Back then I bought a $5k Masami Teraoka watercolor.  A few years later I decided that was really stupid so I sold it and managed to break even.  Of course it is worth a lot more today. 

In hindsight I correctly pivoted to collecting a few photographs which at the time was just starting to bloom.  This was when Ansel Adam prints took off.  Couldn't afford one of those so I spent $1500 on an Irving Penn "Cuzco Children" print.  I bought it because I loved the image and it gave me joy every time I looked at it.   

Fast forward a few years, my MIL buys a triplex and my wife and I move into one of the units.  The kitchen needed a remodel so I sold the Cuzco for about $9k.  Today that print is worth over $250k.  Had I not sold it then, I'm sure there would have been a dozen times later that I might have wanted or needed to sell.  It is only in hindsight that it was originally $1.5k and today over $250k.

Picking up my check at the gallery that sold the Cuzco for me, was a show of a new photographer, Michael Kenna. Gallery owner said take a look. Most important was the price, about $90 per print.  I picked out one and my wife picked out another.  From time to time I would check the market for Kenna prints.  What concerned me was although most editions were limited to 45-90 prints, he had a LOT of images , and a lot of the images had a very similar feel to them.  Maybe 10 years later, I gave them to a gallery to sell and realized $5k for the one my wife picked, and $3.75k for the one I picked.  This past year, I happened to come across a Kenna print at an estate sale.  I bought it for $150.  I have no hopes of selling it for 1000s.  I just knew it would always be worth at least $150.  I still have 5 other various prints bought at the beginning but only one is worth a meaningful amount.

Lessons learned. 

Don't buy art as an investment.  In particular never buy anything from one of those resort city type galleries. If you do buy art you have to take care of it.  Selling is hard.  The sell commission is around 15-30%.  The tax rate is around 30%.

I have not bought anything new (coins) for awhile now and have been selling off a lot of the sprawl to try to focus on just a few nice pieces. Having lost a couple of family members recently made me realize it is really hard to deal with someone else's stuff. I am hanging on to my 7070 and my two 7100 albums since those are somewhat self contained. And I've kept some silver just because that is easy to sell. I sold off a lot of mint stuff and single type coins because they just didn't really mean a whole lot to me and my kids aren't going to be interested in them. My wife and I sold some other collectibles that we no longer had an interest in either.

Next up is selling off my early 70s sports cards. I will probably keep my 1973 Topps Baseball complete set but will sell off the rest of the partial sets and individual baseball, football, basketball and hockey cards from 71-74 that I collected as a kid. It's hard sometimes to let thing go but it is time.

Those are unfortunately not worth a lot because anybody and everybody was issuing sets then. Unless you happen to have one of the rarer rookie cards. Even with my 70s cards, with the exception of a very few cards, the local guy I know said we are really not interested as they have a large inventory of most cards and not that many buyers. So I will have to ebay them and see what I can get.

Kenkat and JBUCK I would bet you both have more than you realize in those cards they might be a little work but probably a little bit of money there.

I can probably count on one hand the number of coins I have that are not PM. TBH, if they're not silver or gold, they just haven't interested me from a collecting stand point, but can appreciate the history when I read about them.

That said, that collecting mindset was helpful for me financially this past year. Been away from the hobby for awhile as I was laid off last year and even had to sell a couple of gold coins and some silver as my employment search went longer than expected (and it's not fun to even window shop when you're selling off to pay bills). Had no issue finding buyers which helped pay the bills. Now that I'm working again and back on my feet, I'm going to try and catch up on the proof ASEs I didn't buy last year and start window shopping again.

I know many try to collect what they love, but collecting what I thought would at least hold its value was very helpful for me this past year.