[Fred]

Originally Posted by Snapolit1

Funny, a bunch of people on the board know my eBay handle, and when I list something they not infrequently send me an email asking if there is any reason I am selling and hopefully nothing wrong and not a forced sale, etc. Nice sentiment, and I appreciate the notes.

Since I started collecting, I've never had any hesitation selling stuff I have. In my entire collection there are probably 10-15 items that I have no plans to ever sell, let's call them the "super special" stuff, usually one of a kind items. But everything else is fair game. I periodically go through the safe deposit box and find a few items that I haven't thought of in years and decide to give them a new home. Most of them have gone up in value.

I guess I always assumed this is what 95% of the people on the board do. Buy occasionally, sell occasionally, refine the collection, branch out, move things on that no longer resonate loudly. Am I mistaken? Are there a lof of collectors who buy and never plan on sellng any of their stuff? I'm not quite knocking on heaven's door at this point (I hope), but I have little interest in in leaving my heirs 100s or 1000s of things the need to deal with. To me that seems like it could be a burden.

I rarely sell things and when I do it's usually because I have a dupe of the card or I've just want to thin things out and have a few $$ for something else that interests me more at that time.

There was an interesting thread recently about heirs being able to value cards/collectibles at the date of death of the collector.
This seems to provide some possibly interesting tax advantages for the heirs.
But then again, if you're looking at 1000s of cards, it would become an undertaking unless the heirs had a clue about current values.

I knew someone that sold off a significant portion of his collection so that his family wouldn't have to deal with it. But that was a while back before tax reporting for AHs or even fleabay became a "thing".