When you sell it as a lot all you are doing is taking pennies on the dollar
and the buyer gets all the profit. If collecting starts to decline the buyer
still makes money, if the hobby goes up they make even more money.
The issue starts to suck more if you actually paid a pretty penny for your
collectables and then want to cash out. Plenty of people started collecting
what was pretty much trash (before e-waste was even a thing and Ebay didn't
exist yet) and those people will make out well either way.
I remember as a teen going to a coin/stamp shop and seeing people in suits
show up to buy the place out with a suitcase full of cash for maybe $15% of
catalog value when stamp collecting was going crazy in the early 1980's.
Granted he probably would have been better off auctioning his best stuff at
that time and burning the rest as collecting has been going down every year
since (except for some rarities here and there).
-----Original Message-----
From: Sellam Abraham via cctalk
Sent: Wednesday, June 26, 2024 12:59 PM
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
Cc: Sellam Abraham
Subject: [cctalk] Re: Revocable Living Trust for Computer Collectors
On Wed, Jun 26, 2024 at 9:31 AM Teo Zenios via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
wrote:
Ditching a collection is a full time job. It took you
so many years to put
it together and it will take the same amount of time to part it out if you
expect to get any real money out of it (unless you sell the most wanted
items and recycle the rest).
This is very true, as I discovered when I began selling off (what remained
of) my collection in 2017. I thought I'd get it all out in a year or so.
It's been 7 years and I'm still at it, with no real end in sight. Granted
I haven't been working on it diligently, and I still ended up with 40
pallets of stuff after the Great Vintage Computing Heist of 2012, but
disgorging a large collection is in fact a major undertaking, unless you're
willing to sell it all at one price, and can find such a buyer to take it
in one lot.
Sellam
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