RunningBum
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
- Joined
- Jun 18, 2007
- Messages
- 13,314
Like many kids, I collected sports cards. Baseball, football, and to a lesser extent, basketball and hockey. Saved up my allowance to buy new cards, and swapped duplicates with friends for cards I didn't have. I'm also lucky that my mother never tossed the cards out. I knew there were old rare cards out there, but we were buying 10 cards for a dime and never thought about handling them carefully. I have zero regrets about that.
10 or so years later, I found a collectors magazine that says a 1968 Nolan Ryan rookie card goes for $1400. I've got one! But it didn't take long to find out that's only for cards in pristine, "mint" condition, which mine most definitely is not. Knock 95% off the price for my worn card, and it's still worth something. But how to find a buyer who'd pay $70? Pretty impossible, so the only recourse is to sell to a dealer at a card show or a local retail shop. And they will probably only pay 20-30% of a card's value unless they have a buyer lined up, since they take the risk they may never sell it. So I gave up on the idea that I had anything of real value. But still, I put many cards in 9 pocket plastic sheets to put in binders, and hard cases for the most "valuable" ones, and eventually put them on display in my loft outside my bedroom.
Maybe 8-10 years ago I saw a CBS Sunday Morning feature on collecting, where they interviewed a guy my age who said 10 years before that he was the youngest one at a card show, and he still was the youngest at the time of the interview. A dying hobby. Oh well, I still enjoy looking at my cards. I even catalogued them in an online database.
Then came COVID. Apparently a whole group of people got back into the hobby, and have remained in it. Even younger people. Prices are up, and the "vintage" cars I own, mostly 1960s and 70s, are selling. Condition is still a major factor in price. There is a small industry in card grading, where you send a card off to an authenticator like PSA, and they verify the card is not a fake or trimmed to clean up ragged edges, give it a 1-10 condition grade, and put it in a slab that preserves the card and prevents swapping an inferior card for it. But a lot of people are like me, they are willing to take sub-par condition to have cards they want.
And now, e-commerce links buyers and sellers so we aren't so dependent on dealers. I found a site COMC.com (Check Out My Cards) that takes your cards (at 50 cents per), photographs front and back, and lists it for sale at a price you choose. They suggest a price and also show the same card available from other sellers as a guide. I also look at recent eBay sales. COMC takes a 5% cut of sales, and charges 10% to cash out your balance, but you can use full value to buy cards from other sellers. And that is my plan, to buy cards I wasn't able to get as a kid.
So I sent off 100 cards, all of them duplicates from my collection that I'd list between $2-$35. It takes up to 16 weeks for them to be processed for sale, but most of mine took less than half that time. Now, would they really sell? Bang! In 8 days, I've sold 14 cards, for nearly $100. In return, I used those funds to buy 35 cards of favorite players to fill in subsets like league leader cards each year I collected. There's nothing brilliant about my strategy, I just happened to want some cards that didn't cost much in just fair condition. Those numbers may swap as I save up sales to buy more expensive cards I have my eye on.
I could easily just outright buy these cards and not put a dent in my budget. But that just doesn't seem right. The fun was always in the collecting. I really like using COMC because it basically brings back the card trading I did as a kid, trading duplicates for cards I want, with a middleman taking a small cut. The cash amount is pretty meaningless. I've sold 14 cards for 97 tokens, and bought 35 for 82 tokens.
I don't mean to come off as a shill for COMC.com. It happens to work well for the price point of most of the cards I'm dealing with, and I can sell for the same price that any dealer on there can.
eBay is obviously another option, but you really need a reputation for buyers to trust you as a seller, and then you have to deal with collecting payment and shipping, all of which COMC handles for me.
I found a couple of Facebook groups, and again there is the trust issue. Dealers and large collectors develop a good reputation and people won't hesitate to buy from them, but I am an unknown. However, someone posted about wanting a 1971 Willie Mays card, and I offered up mine (again, a duplicate) for $90. Someone else PM'd me and offered $80, and I took it. And I just today sold another $6 card similarly. I may do a bulk sale of my "common", or non-star player, duplicates. This doesn't quite have the same feel as I've got cash coming to me and I'd rather buy with my COMC credits, but I guess I can buy with cash too. There are also some supplies for the hobby I can say I used sales cash from.
The Nolan Ryan rookie? I've decided to get it and a few other cards sent off to be graded. It has nagged at me what will happen to the cards when I'm gone. My son says he understands the hobby but isn't interested himself, and I don't want anything anyone inherits from me to be stuck with something they don't want to deal with. So he will sell them, which is fine with me, and it's a lot easier to sell graded cards as they get more expensive, and he'll know which ones have the most value. Yes, people really do try to pass off fake Mickey Mantle cards. I'm guessing I have around $10K worth of cards total (maybe more based on how sales have gone so far), and the 19 (out of 8000) I sent off are about 40% of that. Chump change in the scope of my estate, but I like having this handled.
Any other card collectors out there?
10 or so years later, I found a collectors magazine that says a 1968 Nolan Ryan rookie card goes for $1400. I've got one! But it didn't take long to find out that's only for cards in pristine, "mint" condition, which mine most definitely is not. Knock 95% off the price for my worn card, and it's still worth something. But how to find a buyer who'd pay $70? Pretty impossible, so the only recourse is to sell to a dealer at a card show or a local retail shop. And they will probably only pay 20-30% of a card's value unless they have a buyer lined up, since they take the risk they may never sell it. So I gave up on the idea that I had anything of real value. But still, I put many cards in 9 pocket plastic sheets to put in binders, and hard cases for the most "valuable" ones, and eventually put them on display in my loft outside my bedroom.
Maybe 8-10 years ago I saw a CBS Sunday Morning feature on collecting, where they interviewed a guy my age who said 10 years before that he was the youngest one at a card show, and he still was the youngest at the time of the interview. A dying hobby. Oh well, I still enjoy looking at my cards. I even catalogued them in an online database.
Then came COVID. Apparently a whole group of people got back into the hobby, and have remained in it. Even younger people. Prices are up, and the "vintage" cars I own, mostly 1960s and 70s, are selling. Condition is still a major factor in price. There is a small industry in card grading, where you send a card off to an authenticator like PSA, and they verify the card is not a fake or trimmed to clean up ragged edges, give it a 1-10 condition grade, and put it in a slab that preserves the card and prevents swapping an inferior card for it. But a lot of people are like me, they are willing to take sub-par condition to have cards they want.
And now, e-commerce links buyers and sellers so we aren't so dependent on dealers. I found a site COMC.com (Check Out My Cards) that takes your cards (at 50 cents per), photographs front and back, and lists it for sale at a price you choose. They suggest a price and also show the same card available from other sellers as a guide. I also look at recent eBay sales. COMC takes a 5% cut of sales, and charges 10% to cash out your balance, but you can use full value to buy cards from other sellers. And that is my plan, to buy cards I wasn't able to get as a kid.
So I sent off 100 cards, all of them duplicates from my collection that I'd list between $2-$35. It takes up to 16 weeks for them to be processed for sale, but most of mine took less than half that time. Now, would they really sell? Bang! In 8 days, I've sold 14 cards, for nearly $100. In return, I used those funds to buy 35 cards of favorite players to fill in subsets like league leader cards each year I collected. There's nothing brilliant about my strategy, I just happened to want some cards that didn't cost much in just fair condition. Those numbers may swap as I save up sales to buy more expensive cards I have my eye on.
I could easily just outright buy these cards and not put a dent in my budget. But that just doesn't seem right. The fun was always in the collecting. I really like using COMC because it basically brings back the card trading I did as a kid, trading duplicates for cards I want, with a middleman taking a small cut. The cash amount is pretty meaningless. I've sold 14 cards for 97 tokens, and bought 35 for 82 tokens.
I don't mean to come off as a shill for COMC.com. It happens to work well for the price point of most of the cards I'm dealing with, and I can sell for the same price that any dealer on there can.
eBay is obviously another option, but you really need a reputation for buyers to trust you as a seller, and then you have to deal with collecting payment and shipping, all of which COMC handles for me.
I found a couple of Facebook groups, and again there is the trust issue. Dealers and large collectors develop a good reputation and people won't hesitate to buy from them, but I am an unknown. However, someone posted about wanting a 1971 Willie Mays card, and I offered up mine (again, a duplicate) for $90. Someone else PM'd me and offered $80, and I took it. And I just today sold another $6 card similarly. I may do a bulk sale of my "common", or non-star player, duplicates. This doesn't quite have the same feel as I've got cash coming to me and I'd rather buy with my COMC credits, but I guess I can buy with cash too. There are also some supplies for the hobby I can say I used sales cash from.
The Nolan Ryan rookie? I've decided to get it and a few other cards sent off to be graded. It has nagged at me what will happen to the cards when I'm gone. My son says he understands the hobby but isn't interested himself, and I don't want anything anyone inherits from me to be stuck with something they don't want to deal with. So he will sell them, which is fine with me, and it's a lot easier to sell graded cards as they get more expensive, and he'll know which ones have the most value. Yes, people really do try to pass off fake Mickey Mantle cards. I'm guessing I have around $10K worth of cards total (maybe more based on how sales have gone so far), and the 19 (out of 8000) I sent off are about 40% of that. Chump change in the scope of my estate, but I like having this handled.
Any other card collectors out there?
) a graded Nolan Ryan card and a 1984 Astros team signed baseball.
No intention of selling it.
) in this hobby. After an initial attempt of going through the cards and listing and selling a few on eBay, I have abandoned this effort as too tedious and not really worth my time. 
