Collecting vs Investing

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Posted By: Jason

may be on the simple side, but this a great question and I often find myself wondering about people's motivation/passion during transactions with others in the hobby, be it a card shop, a dealer at a table, or just watching others buy cards.

I buy cards to collect. I love collecting things, completing sets, either pre-made or creating some subset for myself. For a while as a teen, I became obsessed with the idea of flipping for a profit, for the sport of it...but then I realized that most of the original fun had gone out of it. A friend and I would go to a show with a set value of cash and a set value in cards, and the object of the game was to walk out with more of each. The problem was that even when I would "win" I would walk out with a bunch of stuff that didn't make sense to have or could contribute to any collection.

Over the years, I have assigned much more value to the concept of building something important in life. Something that is important to me, in that it's a collection that I enjoy researching, finding, and owning. But then also something that is important in its own right, in that it is a focused collection - something that others will likely assign a nice value to...not so serious as to qualify for a provenance designation, obviously, but something that others like as well, is a required chracteristic of intrinsic importance.

And then there is the simple, selfish desire to build something that you can be proud to pass on, that may survive you. We're only here a short time, time is extremely short, and what you do with that time and who you impact is important.

And so I hope to pass along to my kids some day, a collection of sports memorabilia that consists of several focused collections:
Autographed HOF baseballs
The Handley Collection (all things related to relatives who played the game)
HOF rookie cards
Chicago Cubs Team Sets
The Player Collections of players that were important to me or my father (Eddie Mathews, Roy Campanella, Duke Snider, Ozzie Smith, Walter Payton, Kirby Puckett)
others TBD....

Anyway...that's how I see it.

Investments?....only so I can include it on the assets side my personal net worth calculation, need to justify a purchase to the wife, or heaven forbid, someday I desperately needs the money...


If you've read this much, I commend you, and apologize for wasting too much of your lunch hour!!!
Jason