Originally Posted by glchen
I'm going to give the opposite advice from most others here. You are only 57. You could easily live another 30 years. That's a long, long time that you can still be enjoying your collection. Do your typical pruning of your collection for items that no longer interest you, but if I were you, I'd keep your collection pretty much intact. I'd wait until you're 70 or if some serious health issue crops up before I'd consider selling most everything.
I'd still keep an emergency plan with your wife, so if you got hit by a bus tomorrow (which could happen at any age), she would know what to do with your collection. For example, I have an agreement with Heritage where if I consign close to 10K in value or more, my seller's commission will always be 0%. So, I've told my love ones where my collection is, my Heritage contact, and to just send everything they don't want there. My ideal plan would be to send the more expensive stuff to Heritage, and the cheaper stuff to PWCC, but that's probably too difficult for my wife and kids to figure out. The keys for me here are to get a 0% seller's commission locked in, a contact a the auction house you can trust and is easily reachable, and a big enough auction house where you are confident they will be around for awhile. If you are alive, you have more discretion to vary the pick of your auction house on a bunch of different criteria (when the next auction is, how fast is the payout, etc), but with something like this, you want to be able to just have your family dump a whole bunch of stuff at the auction house, and have them sort through it, and auction it for you. You do not want someone who will look at your wife, and say that they will buy your collection for $XXX, and where she won't know better, and think that's a great deal, IMHO.
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