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Originally Posted by Exhibitman
Well said, John. Except for a brief break from 1981-1988 I've always collected. It is my go-to relaxation activity.
Skyrocketing prices drove me out of mainstream baseball about 20 years ago, so i went whole-hog into boxing cards. I went back to baseball cards sporadically, and I am glad I did given the prices now.
Several years ago I had to go full 'kill-eat' on cards because my daughter wanted to go to medical school and I needed every dime of discretionary income and more to fund it. She did some clinical work as a volunteer in college and decided she's not suited to it, so I am paying for two years of grad school instead of four, and no internship or residency to subsidize either. But I digress. When I lost all discretionary income I had to ask some hard questions about my collecting and one of the things I realized is that my passion for it is not in accumulating slabs with large numbers (and prices), nor is it in set building (I don't want the Joe Shlabotniks), it is having cards of stars in albums like I did when I was a kid. That's where I've focused. I buy lots of cheaper cards to fill out my collection just as I would have when I was ten. VG or NM? Who cares...Just get me the cards.
The COVID run-up has mostly been a selling event for me, getting me out of the slabs I accumulated earlier in favor of lesser grade raw cards I can just enjoy. The money I just hold for the inevitable price crash so i can start buying collections again and turning them out for a profit. My goal is to beat the ROI our financial planner achieves with traditional investments over the next ten years. So there is a money component to it too; has to be in this day and age. But for my personal collection, gimme this in an album over the same thing in a high # PSA slab at 20x the price any day of the week:
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Expanding on this concept, my notable purchases during the pandemic have been
very specific. Rare American boxing type cards, global boxing type cards I needed for my type set, or previously uncatalogued cards of a few athletes I collect.