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| Not my collection but very similar |
Like most children in America in the 80’s I was born into a
culture of collecting and hording.
My
brother and I had countless He-Man, Transformers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,
Gi-Joe action figures (they aren’t dolls!).
Of course we took them out of the box and played with them but never the
less the idea of having more characters and more playsets was deeply
ingrained.
After I got a bit older it
become about videogames, and then I added comic books, and eventually I even went
back to action figures, in particular Spawn figures, but this time I kept them
all in the box.
I figured one day my
collection would be worth millions of dollars and that I would be able to
retire on it alone.
I’m older now. Not so
much wiser, but maybe more realistic.
After discovering MMM, and truly realizing that material possessions are
not what brings me happiness I made a big decision. I was going to liquidate my collection during
my trip to the states.
Selling this stuff was so serious that I actually didn’t
tell any of my friends that I was coming back to visit. I wanted to have total focus on completing
this task as I knew it was going to be a huge undertaking.
This was actually somewhat of a bone of contention with my family. When I told them I was
going to sell all of my old videogames, old consoles, old action figures, and
just some of the junk I had taking up space at my parent’s place they were
taken aback. “You spent so much time and
money collecting those!” “They are part
of your childhood memories!” I was
told. But the truth of the matter is my
collections weren’t memories. They were
things. The memories of my childhood are
mine forever. I cannot sell them nor
would I ever want to. But the plastic
things taking up space, well, that is real money sitting on the table. It could be making me 6-10% per year instead
of sitting there gathering dust. I later
realized too that several of my family members had similar collections and that
by me selling mine it was in a roundabout way taken as criticism when I told
them my collection itself had no meaning.
I had changed my view on collecting things and wanted to
take this opportunity to re-coup what I could and put it towards something more
meaningful. Either by investing the capital
I received or purchasing a new bike that would make me thousands of dollars per
year.
So how did I do it? I
basically followed these steps.
1. Inventory. I had to take a look at everything that I had
held onto over the years and write it down.
This meant breaking into every box that had been sitting in my parent’s
garage for almost 5 years. I had to
unpack all my Spawn figures. I had to
gather all the cables for my old Sega Genesis, SegaCD, 32X behemoth and make
sure all the games still worked. It meant
keeping a spreadsheet of all the things that I wanted to get rid of. This was a lengthy, dusty, dirty, time
consuming process that took me about two days of full time work to do
accurately. Depending on how much stuff
you have it could take more or less.
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| Taking inventory |
2.
Choose.
After I had everything inventoried I had to
choose what really is going and what really is staying.
I did hold onto a few things that I knew were
rare and have gone up in value.
I own a
copy of Panzer Dragoon Saga for the Sega Saturn.
Cost me about $50 new and now goes on ebay
for about $200 (and because Sega lost the source code there is a good chance
this game will never be re-released as a virtual console or downloadable
title).
I kept my old Lunar games as
they really did have a special place and again had actually gained value.
I kept most of my comic collection as I
really do enjoy reading them.
In the end
out of the twenty or thirty boxes I went through only about three boxes worth
of stuff was special enough for me to keep.
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| Worth quite a bit on eBay |
3. Separate. For a lot of people I think this is where
they start to have a problem. I had so
much stuff that if I tried to sell it all separately it would have taken me six
months of full time work. So instead I
had to make sets. I sold all of the Sega
games with the consoles as a set. All
the Dreamcast games went as a set. I
managed to get in contact with the comic book store I bought most of my comics
from and sold them ALL eight five of my Spawn figures as one big set. It felt great to separate all of my stuff
into about 15 different piles and know that it was all or nothing. Either you were buying all four seasons of
Futurama or none at all.
4. Where. Now that I knew what I was going to sell I
had to choose where. Originally I wanted
to do everything on Craigslist but I quickly discovered that my market was too
small. I shifted over to eBay. I wanted to avoid fees by using Craigslist
but almost more important than the money was just getting rid of this
stuff. And as it turns out I got more
than I thought I would going to eBay.
5.
Assign a
price.
This took some research and
actually I was surprised that a lot of my stuff when sold in big sets I could
get quite a bit of money.
The Sega
consoles and games I was going to sell for $40 I ended up getting almost three
times that on eBay.
My Gameboy Advance
games sold for a lot more than I had thought I could get for them on Craigslist.
I put together a set of Final Fantasy stuff
including games, art books, models, etc. and got almost four times on eBay than
what I thought I could get on Craiglist.
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| My beloved Sega Genesis/CD/32X combo |
6. Profit! I was surprised how quickly a lot of my stuff
sold. I downloaded an eBay app for my
iPhone and it seemed every day it would ding two or three times with more stuff
I had sold. The adventure didn’t end
there. I still had to package up and
ship everything.
7. Shipping. I learned a lot about shipping. Don’t ship GameBoy Advance games in bubble
mailers. Don’t wrap big boxes in paper
and then just write the shipping info (if the paper gets torn then the post
office suddenly just has a box). I
shipped most of my auction parcel post to cut down on shipping.
8. Stay in
contact. Thanking and keeping contact
with my customers was very important.
Some people bought two or even three of my auctions. I did have some grumpy customers which was
just as much my fault as it was theirs.
That was the basic path that I followed and ended up with
about $1400 dollars in my pocket.
I
mentioned earlier that I was going to use it either to invest or buy a bike and
I went with the latter.
I am now the
owner of a brand new Kona Jake the Snake.
It’s light, strong, and hella fast.
I really enjoy coming into work on it!
I keep track of all my progress on RunKeeper.
Join my street team!
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| My new ride! |
In the end I never once felt like by selling the toys of my
youth was I betraying my childhood self.
To do so would be silly. The toys
I had didn’t make the memories I hold now.
It was me myself that made them.
Perhaps a toy could trigger a long lost memory and I think that many
people hold onto their collections just for that reason. They revisit it every year or so and remember
the “good ole times.” But for me those
times don’t end. In fact by selling this
stuff I am looking forward to a new set of good ole times where I get to be a
kid again. I think the child in any of
us would agree that that’s a good thing.
