Helping fellow board members become "better" collectors

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I thought it would be both interesting and beneficial for board members to identify your biggest mistake(s) made while pursuing your individual collecting interest(s). The hope is that maybe sharing this knowledge will help others avoid the same pitfalls.

I'll start off with my list and elaborate a little bit on each:

1. In an effort to get every item from my Baseball Hall of Fame Rookies collection into a major third-party grading company holder, I "trimmed down" a number of vintage memorabilia items (thus destroying them) so that they would fit into either an SGC OR BGS holder. This included an extremely rare 28" X 40" Negro League broadside, which I have since searched to replace for the past 5 years with no luck.

2. Early on in the collecting process, I could not afford many of the "true" rookie cards that I would need for my collection so I started buying the earliest item that I could afford for each player. Later on, I found myself going back and "upgrading" most of the HOF'ers by picking up an earlier piece than what I already had and then selling the original item. In this manner, I lost money on these transactions almost every time, save for a few that I got lucky with and they appreciated significantly. If I could do it over again, I would simply wait until I had the money to buy the true rookie card and make the purchase one time and be done with that HOF'er.

3. Trying to determine Type I photos from a computer scan (self-explanatory).