Posted on 10/30/2011 3:10:05 AM PDT by lowbridge
If you stare at the Thomas Kinkade painting on your wall each day thinking "There's my retirement fund," prepare to pour skim lattes until you're 90.
Collecting as a hobby can be a fun, worthwhile and potentially lucrative way to pass time. Amassing collectibles as investments, however, can be a disappointing endeavor yielding nothing but piles of devalued tchotchkes for the next of kin to sort through.
The founder of comic book industry bible Wizard, Gareb Shamus, said a year ago that the best advice a collector could heed was to buy what they liked and do their homework. Then again, he's also a Spider-Man collector who paid $1,700 for an issue with a cover drawn by artist Todd MacFarlane featuring the villain Sandman. The book's value jumped to between $30,000 and $40,000 when the Sandman appeared in the latest Spider-Man film.
-snip
"Collectibles" investors, however, are beholden to a very subjective, eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY - News)-driven market in which their precious knick-knack can be worth $800 or less than $50. While sites such as Kovels.com offer some guidance, "collectibles" and the companies that make them are slaves to demand and market forces and the realization that their mass-produced product is only worth as much as a buyer will pay for it.
"I tell people that keeping collectibles is like storing money under your mattress," says Lou Kahn, head of the Bakerstowne Collectibles appraisal and consignment service in West Hempstead, N.Y. "You're going to have the same amount of money next year, but it's going to be worth a lot less."
(Excerpt) Read more at finance.yahoo.com ...
^5! HAHA!
I had a wooden plate once for sale on ebay and on it was a carving of the city of Berchtesgaden - it got pulled from auction because someone complained.
I had sold another one the previous week and no one said anything.
White Elephant Gift that became a clay pigeon...
;o)
I have Jose Canseco rookie cards. :)
I have a friend with an almost complete set that every now & then offers, (or threatens), to give to me. Do I really want a yellow elephant? Not because I think they are worth anything but I value the historical viewpoints of any old book or magazine.
I have the Nat. Geo. set on CD - very poor quality scans of the images, have heard the DVD reissue is somewhat better, but still not the quality of the dead tree version.
Now I'd love to have a complete collection of Popular Mechanics, Mechanics Illustrated or Popular Science, but I'm not going to pay ten or a hundred dollars an issue, which is what the Internet sellers want, (they may sit on that magazine for ten years or more before they find a buyer), but I might pony up a few dollars for a well scanned set if the publishers were to put one on the market.
Might have been my cousin! :-)
Ouch.
I think she was just in a hurry to use my bedroom for a storage room. Her only explanation was I didnt think youd mind.
To which you reply, “Yeah, I got tired of that Honus Wagner card anyway.”
At the time I really didnt care about the cards. I did care about the guitar. Years later when the market opened up for baseball cards I often thought about them.
I believe that the entire Popular Mechanics archive is available on the web.
The few scans I have seen looked very good. Here is a few quick Google search links on the issue
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets
http://books.google.com/books/about/Popular_Mechanics.html?id=Vc8DAAAAMBAJ/news/4295218
Regards
alfa6 ;>}
It is, along with many others. I go there a lot, it's not quite the same as having the dead tree version in your hands.
Thanks for the links though.
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