A Common Theme Among Collectors

It's been a while since I blogged, so I thought I'd share a thought with you.  Over the last few weekends, I tried my hand as a comic book dealer.  I set up at some shows with the idea of both selling, and buying.  I set my prices to sell my "lesser" material at bargain prices and I wanted top dollar for my nice material.

Fact is, I knew exactly what I wanted to sell my better comicbooks for.  How did I price them?  I have a low grade copy of Hulk #2 in a CGC Slab.  My copy grades a 3.0. 

I set my sell price at the dollar figure that would allow me to take the cash and then go to a popular on-line auction site and buy the same book in the grade 3.5.  While this may give the impression that my book was over-priced, it was not.  I shopped hard for that 3.5, and all I needed was a buyer who wanted my book and wasn't aware of a slighlty nicer copy.  Alas, it did not happen.  In fact, I sold very few expensive comics while I was acting as a dealer.  Disappointing, really.  I do not attribute it to my prices, but rather to the economy in general.  People seemed to sit on their wallets at the shows I was selling at.

Always one to make lemonade out of lemons, I decided to make money other ways.  I did sell a lot of Manga books and a few hats and some of the cheaper books.  They paid for the adventure.  But another way I wanted to make money was on the purchase of comicbooks.  I looked at the shows as a buying opportunity.

OK, we're drilling down to the point of this long-winded diatribe.  I met not just one, but several collectors who were interested in my better priced books, but did not buy.  Seeing that they weren't interested in purchasing, after establishing they had good books at home, I told them that I was a buyer.

and here's the thing...

Of the guys who truly gave the impression of having good stuff, they all had one thing in common:

THEY ALL REFUSED TO SELL ANYTHING.

Yep, there's the theme of this blog entry.  All of them refused to sell their good material.  And that makes sense.  Why is it that savers always have money and spenders never do?  Because the spenders give their money to someone else, but the savers do not.  The same is true of collectors.  If you want to have a big collection, worth oodles and oodles of cash, you must learn one important rule.

IF YOU GET SOMETHING REALLY GOOD, DON'T SELL IT.

The best way to get a great return on a collection is to fill that collection with good things and keep them.  If you sell your best stuff, you end up with a collection of run-of-the-mill stuff, or no collection at all.

So, if you collect, and you get something great, don't sell it.  If you absolutely need cash, try to sell off the more common stuff first.  That can take discipline and timing because the fastest way to raise cash is to sell the better stuff.  But try not to do that, OK?