Card Rich, Cash Poor

 

I suspect that over the course of the last two years a new major class of baseball card collector has emerged: the Card Rich, Cash Poor collector.  I am one of them.

This is kind of a lucky thing to be, though it also has its drawbacks.  Basically this is the collector who is not wealthy and does not have a high paying job (cash poor) but prior to the explosion in prices had been able to build up a decent collection of old cards when they were cheap and is now sitting on a collection worth many times what was originally paid for it (card rich).

In retrospect I now realize that I was pretty lucky to get back into baseball cards at the time I did, because I have a pretty decent vintage American card collection (which I don't talk about much on here) which I was fortunate enough to put together at exactly the right moment, allowing me to boast of being card rich and cash poor today.

For about a six year period between 2009 and 2015 I dabbled a bit in selling old Japanese video games that I scoured from junk bins in second hand shops.  This generated a couple hundred bucks or so a month, sometimes more, which I treated as kind of "found money".Since it was accumulating in a Paypal account, I decided to find out what that whole Ebay thing everyone was talking about was and I ended up going down the vintage baseball card listing rabbit hole.

I was pretty amazed to find that vintage cards which had been so crazily in demand back in the late 80s/ early 90s when I had previously collected were so plentiful and cheap.  It was like I was a kid in a candy store, I basically started converting most of my video game sales money into old baseball cards every month, month after month for six years.

Around 2015 or so my supply of old video games started to dry up, and with it my baseball card budget, so my six year spending spree came to an end, but not before I had built up a pretty decent collection.  Which is now worth several times more than what I paid for it back then.

On the one hand, this is great.  The "I hope my wife doesn't find out how much I'm spending on baseball cards" stress that I felt back in 2009-2015 has been replaced with a much better "How do I tell my wife that my baseball card collection is worth enough to cover a significant portion of our kids' university tuition in the future?" feeling.  Its way better than if the reverse had happened, I can tell you.

On the other hand though, its also destroyed the collecting goals I used to have.  For example, one thing I had dreamed of doing was putting together a 1956 Topps set, which I've always thought was the most beautiful.  I was able to piece together all of the major stars in the set (pictured above) except Williams and Mantle.  I didn't pay more than 100$ for any of those cards (PSA 4 Jackie Robinson was the most expensive at 95$) and the Williams would have easily been in my budget and even the Mantle would have been feasible.  

But the run up in prices over the past two years has crushed that idea - I wouldn't be able to afford any of those cards today. While the value of my collection has soared my regular income has stayed the same.  So while I'm happy to have this really amazing partial 1956 set, I'm also frustrated to know that it is one I'll never be able to complete.  There are a few others that fall into the same category.

I suspect that there are a lot of collectors out there in a similar situation.  What do we do with these cards?  Hold onto them even though they are part of collecting goals that are no longer feasible?  Sell them to raise money for things we actually need even though we really like them?  

Its not a bad situation to be in and I'm not complaining about it, but I'm curious if the scale of collectors in this situation might result in new hobby trends.