Welcome back fellow questers! Another week and again I’m just continuing on the grindset mindset. Gotta keep feeding the machine so that I can get done with this and cash out.
Fun one today, we’re going to be talking about the world of high end collectibles. Now, don’t just immediately tune out because the stuff I’m going to tell you is probably out of your price range, but is genuinely interesting.
Now, most of you probably read my post about the baseball cards I found in my dad’s house, but that wasn’t even 1% of just the cards he had which were valuable. Which is staggering, honestly. He had so much crap built up over his life and unbeknownst to him a good deal of it was valuable. Now I’m sorting through it all.
A few months back, before I even started on this little journey and Substack, I sent 20 or so cards away to get graded by the premier card grader in the industry: PSA. Comic books go to a different company, CGC, and surprisingly these two companies are on opposite sides of the country. One in California, the other in Florida, go figure. Anyways, I sent these cards off in bulk to PSA for them to grade at $18 a piece. You see now why I’m selling action figures to get money to grade cards and comics.
I’d like to show you all a card that is worth as much as my mortgage payment
Here’s some fun, nerdy, details about the grading and authentication process. Since this particular card is worth something like $1,700 there’s obviously a high level of detail that’s being paid to it. PSA provides a certification number on everything they grade, you’ll see it up in the top right of the card, this one is 69265445. There’s also a scannable barcode on the left, and a QR code on the back. PSA keeps a digital inventory on all of their graded items as well, and it provides collectors with information that they’d like to know. This specific card is from the 1985 Garbage Pail Kids first set, and is 1 of 13 similar cards which graded at a 10, the highest grade a card can get. I can also easily look up recent auction prices for this card, which is where I’m getting the $1700 figure, but it could be more or less depending on who is actually bidding at the auction.
I’ll actually be sending this card, and about 14 others back to PSA to hang out in their vault while I sell them on their auction site, Goldin. Ebay is great, it’s been a fun time selling on there and they make it super easy to buy and sell. But if you want top dollar, you have to go to the right market. Goldin has weekly auctions, which these will go into, but also quarterly premier auctions which frequently boast items selling at or above a million dollars. To even get into that auction your item must be valued at or above $5,000, which these unfortunately are not.
Fun note, action figures don’t have this kind of set up. There are certainly graders for action figures, but the market hasn’t really coalesced around one in particular and there aren’t auction sites really geared towards them. It’s something of a newer collectible and as a result there’s less infrastructure around them to make a profit, which is why I’m selling the action figures ungraded on ebay.
Thought you all might enjoy that little glimpse into the world of high end collectibles. Until next time I hope you find something that you like and start collecting. You never know, one day your kids might sell them for big money as well. Thanks so much for joining, please tell a friend to come along on the journey!