Budget Collecting and Buying on Internet Auctions

8/31/2013

I live far out into the big woods.  There are no cards shops close by, so locating cards is a hit or miss affair.  I check thrift stores or the occasional yard sale.  Sometimes I find cards, most times I do not.  My cache of cards to be cataloged is getting smaller and smaller.  I collect 2005 and older so retail is not and option for locating cards either.  I decided to take a look at biding for some cards on a internet auction site.

I looked at Ebay and a few other sites, but finally decided on SportsLots for my first test purchase.  This site is a little different since there is no snipping or last second bidding.  The auctions close after the item goes 3 days without a bid.

The first set of bids was on 1967 Topps Baseball and 1964 Topps Football.  I won 4 of the baseball and 1 of the football.  $1.25 auction and $4.55 shipping = $5.80.  Did not do very well.

The second set was a single item, 34 1970 Topps Baseball.  Won at 0.25 and $4.25 shipping = $4.50, did pretty well.  The cards were in EX+ condition except 1 was in VG.

The third set was more complex.

• 1983 Fleer 507 Sandberg NM won at $3.50
• 1986 Topps 255 Football Esiason EX+ (tiny corner chip) won at 0.25
• 1989/90 Topps Hockey 1 Lemieux NM won at 0.25
• 1971 Topps Baseball 8 card lot(7 EX+/NM 1 poor) won at $2.75
• 1976 Topps 500 Baseball Reggie Jackson(EX+ little off center vertical) won at $2.75
• 2 Largent Football 1979/1980 (NM) won at 3.00
• Shipping $4.15
• Total $16.65

Over all I did very-very well. 52 Collectible cards for $26.95 with a book value of over $75.00.

As a budget collector, this was not the best use of my collecting funds.  My goal is the most cards for the money.  I must admit, having these cards is nice and I do not regret the over all amount that was paid for them.  But I blew my collecting budget for more than a month and only have 52 cards to show for my efforts.

I intend to make occasional purchases of this nature, but I must adhere to my normal methods of obtaining larger numbers of cards.  After all, the goal for my collection is the largest number of cards that I can collect.

Happy Collecting.
Jerry Yeager

Some Links That Could Be Useful

Trading Card Database  Very Nice site for creating online collection as well as resources for researching your collection and images for over half million cards so far
SportLots  Sports Card Auction Site

The Card Collector High end Software for cataloging cards

Sports Card Collector Software better for budget with fewer features

Updated Stats
9525 Cards Cataloged
1981 Fleer Baseball have 643 different cards
1987 Topps Baseball have 420 different cards
Year 1981 have 1110 different cards