Quitting/putting collecting on pause

PanchaMaestro said:
Do 1 or 2 hours a week on eBay. It isn’t hard. It isn’t all or nothing. Have 20-40 things up at all times. I don’t buy things with the intent to sell but I have records, comics, toys everywhere. I don’t view it as a way to profit. These things are already a sunk cost. I view it as a way to stay sane and recoup some of what I spent. Hoard boxes and bubble wrap in your garage. Make sure your printer works. It’s easy and kinda fun even and nice to know something has a bit of a reprieve from its destiny into landfill.
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These are all essential skills any responsible collector should pick up if they don't already have. I also do all of that, and whenever I go a few months without listing things for sale I feel highly irresponsible.

The one exception to what you're doing is that I have a split in what I collect. There's the one side of my collection that I do view as a sunk cost, but there's a separate side where I absolutely look at it as a way to profit to make my collection as free as I can from a financial perspective. There's always a space cost layered on top of that, but my goal has always been for my collection to completely fund itself and more. If you're not doing that and you're not already wealthy from outside of your hobby then you're risking conflict with either your lifestyle or your significant other's opinion.

My significant other doesn't really like the space my collectibles take up, but she sees me packing stuff up that I've sold and has heard enough stories about my collectible wins to rarely ever bug me about it.
 
Ru1977 said:
To quote Tyler Durden, the things you own end up owning you.
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Nicolas Cage has talked about this before. He's a pretty extreme example of this; he almost went bankrupt about 15-20 years ago because he had the most insane high-end collectibles you can imagine. All the most expensive comics, 10+ mansions, multi-million dollar dinosaur fossils, and plenty more. He had to sell most of it and claims he doesn't collect anything anymore because it almost ruined his life.

Besides the bankruptcy it also made him have to hire people to guard all of what he was collecting, but even that didn't work because one of his bodyguards stole his copies of the first appearances of Superman (Action Comics #1) and Batman (Detective Comics #27).
 
EnigmaticClarity said:
Do you collect anything besides action figures?
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Not actively. I have a fairly sizeable collection of original comic art and commissions. Seeing that I enjoy C and D list characters, those commissioned pieces won't yield a high ROI. I do have a beautiful watercolor of the Falcon by Ben Harvey, who seems to be blowing up a bit. That might go up on eBay soon. Otherwise, I have a ton of Blu-Rays, DVDs and Vinyl, but I haven't bought any in years. I need to offload those as well.
 
akajomiha said:
Not actively. I have a fairly sizeable collection of original comic art and commissions. Seeing that I enjoy C and D list characters, those commissioned pieces won't yield a high ROI. I do have a beautiful watercolor of the Falcon by Ben Harvey, who seems to be blowing up a bit. That might go up on eBay soon.
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That's a market that could easily fund any action figure you'd ever want for the rest of your life if you ever decided to fully dive into it. I know nothing about it myself aside from original art used directly for comic strips and books, so I can't speak to one-off drawings from artists other than pieces from famous artists like Jim Lee, John Byrne, etc usually appreciate nicely.
 
Justice said:
Yeah I used to have an action figure Instagram account with several thousand followers and one time I started selling off some older stuff and made over $1000 in less than a week. But I had a built in audience and no seller fees.

I deleted it several years ago because it was stressing me out with the like-bot nature of Instagram but I wish now I had kept it just to sell figures on.

There's a lot of stuff I wouldn't miss at all and some stuff I couldn't bear to part with. Last time I had a sell off it got addictive selling the stuff and seeing my PayPal balance climb so I feel I just need to take the first step and start the ball rolling.
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That's fantastic! Diving into the hobby this deep usually solves all of the space and financial issues any of us might have. I really need to network like this more as well to avoid eBay and consignment fees.
 
I sell for profit when there are things for profit. I’ll buy some comic runs here and there. Keep the half I want and sell the remainders slowly to make the transaction less or “free”. I’m unwilling to do it properly as a second job; putting ads on Craigslist, going to garage sales, etc because I just don’t want it to be that much work. I certainly have the skills to do that and I do that for a living at work. Although there I have the advantage of being a place where people bring us their record collections. I’m ethically unwilling to scalp toys right off Target floor but I certainly sell things for profit when it’s there.
 
I go through periods of selling off old figures that really helps ease the budget. I usually have a few dozen things listed at any given time - I actually just sold one of the last carded Toy Biz figures I had, the series 6 Deadpool w/Doop. It's been listed for several months - priced pretty high, because some part of me wanted to keep it for nostalgia, but I was willing to let it go for that price.

I'm prepared to seriously cut back my purchasing this year, and have already slowed down in anticipation of hardship to come. But I don't *want* to. I'd be perfectly happy to not have this hobby and my employment totally upended by all this chaos and continue to collect my (mostly) little plastic Marvel Universe. So I'm only out if I'm forced out. My collection is definitely too big, but I've managed to store and display it in a way that isn't overwhelming (yet). I'll continue to pare it back a little at a time. And if I do have to stop buying I'll probably hold on to most of what I have - after 20 years I would regret selling everything off in an impulse.
 
One of the biggest superfluous parts of my collection is my NECA Predator stuff. Got way too caught up in it and bought way more of the figures than I really wanted or needed. Would love to be rid of the vast majority, but the idea of figuring out which of the very repetitive accessories go with which figure at this point, not to mention packing and shipping them in a manner to ensure they don't simply snap in half, has had me wondering if I'd be satisfied with just throwing them all out entirely...
 
This! I think we briefly talked about this on the Fwoosh but I'm in the same boat with Predator. The bad thing is that I know a couple of them broke and had to be glued and I have no idea which ones. I'd hate to sell it as good condition only for that to be discovered. Why did I ever buy all these variants that I can barely tell apart. I don't even know most of their names to look up how much the are worth now.
 
I need to do a pretty hard sell off...but when I think about it, I get way too overwhelmed. One of these days I will.
 
I think it was DAmazing who mentioned he was feeling stressed out from the amount of figures he had. I was in the middle years of large pare down and that was exactly how I felt. The amount of toys that were surrounding me in one of my rooms was stressing me out. Apologies to D if I'm incorrectly attributing that to him. I'm at the point where it will either sting if I sell a particular figure or it just doesn't have much monetary value outside of a large lot sale. I still have too many toys, but it's a much more comfortable and manageable amount.
 
I do have a few items that I know would net decent profits and that I never even bothered to open. Maybe I should just start with those to get the idea planted in my routine first, and then the reward would justify itself enough to move on to the less lucrative but ultimately maybe more satisfying overall thinning that my collection needs.
 
I'm going to pare down on buying, but I will freely admit that collecting is one of the few bright spots in my life - I started collecting in my 40s when I had a home and space (and some expendable income) to replace the wild number of toys I lost in a house fire back in 2001. I definitely don't need anymore, and I do sometimes look at the stuff that isn't on display (I rotate who's on the shelf at a given time) and think: I'll never have a big enough or nice enough house to display everything I want to. (And that's not due to paying too much to collect - it's because I had the stupid luck of buying a house, alone, in 2012 before the market reversed. My mortgage is half of what rent is in my city and so I'm in the beneficial position of it being stupid to sell because I'll never get a better deal in this lifetime.)

For what it's worth, it's not action figures that are upsetting me right now - it's board games. I have an art/writing studio in the basement, my little hole in the earth, and I look at the games there sometimes and have an existential crisis knowing I'll never learn to play them all, paint all the minis, and ENJOY them before I'm literally dead. Action figures? I might not have them on display but I know where they are, I can enjoy them during quiet moments. Those GAMES depress the living hell out of me. I feel like that was wasted money and lost joy.

All that being said, yeah, I'm cutting back by at least 50% this year. Only figures that bring me true joy.
 
Listen you bunch of quitters, get your sh$% together and go out and buy more STUFF!!!!!!!!! Moderation is for losers!!!!!! 😜

I'm right there with you all. The collection is too big, and I have had a couple of nagging health issues that sometimes get worse. So at 51 I enjoy what I can, when I can, but I too am worried about how big my collection is and what to do with the majority of it in case something happens. Especially with my oldest only being ten.

Unfortunately I no longer use Ebay since the major changes that make it not worth it with all the fees and reporting, especially as a Canadian. So I am more stuck with online deals through boards I frequent, Kijiji and local shows. It means I don't always get the best price for stuff, but it is what it is.

With prices being what they are, and where they are probably going, it is probably wise to get the collection down to a manageable size sooner or later.
 
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