Becomming a dealer for full time income.

[David W]

I don't know where you live, but in the midwest, in order to make $1000 per week, I would estimate you would need to do $3000-$4000 per week in ebay sales on average to achieve that standard of living.

If you can do that right off the bat, and sustain it, go for it, if not start ebay sales on a part time basis and build up to it.

In some areas of the country $1000 per week may not be enough to live a comfortable lifestyle.

[sycks22]

I wish you luck if you decide to go down that road, but you'll need to get a lot of contacts and inventory before starting the business. I think one of the draws of cards are the fact that they're an excape from our daily lives and not the complete focus of every waking minute.

[drc]

My opinion is to start small and see how it goes. If it builds into a full time business that's great, it it builds into a supplemental income that's good too.

From a practical point, starting off small and slowly is to see how things work-- what does, what doesn't--, getting think kinks out of the system, discovering your errors and misconceptions on the small scale. And, as I said, if that eventually leads to something bigger, great.

One thing is if you star with the pre-conception that you will only sell, say, baseball memorabilia, that might be an off busines choice from the start. There may be other areas (to sell instead of or in addition to sports) than sports memorabilia. Be wary of sentimental blinders. Duly note, I'm not saying sports memorabilia is a bad place to sell, or that it can be good to sell items in an area you are familiar with.

[packs]

I think you would be better off buying and selling modern cards if you're trying to make a living. It would take buying hobby cases and pulling the one per case cut auto or whatever other limited insert the product carries. There's more immediate money in the modern card market and you can still pull from packs. It would be hard to score enough deals on vintage cards to be able to resell at large profits.

[drc]

And to answer the question, I know of someone who bought out a retiring dealer's business of game used memorabilia. I don't know how it worked out, but know the guy ended up with a ton of stuff.

I think vintage is a fine area to deal in. I think it's more stable over a long period of time. Modern would offhand scare me as an investment/business area.

But, as I said, you can deal in multiple areas, including non-sport.