General Forum

I love chasing my collecting goals, but I also love deciding to randomly buy a 1927 Exhibits card, or some such other odd thing.…

I wonder how much people spend on their collections. Everyone’s budget and own sense of what seems right is different, but I’m still curious. This is entirely rhetorical, as it’s too personal a question to actually ask. When I got a higher paying job a couple years ago, I decided to set an actual baseball card budget. Fifty bucks a month – less than my wife’s piano lessons, more than I used to spend. I upped it to $60 when I got a raise. I could spend more, but somehow that feels wrong, given my background working with impoverished people. Still, I’m getting soooo much pleasure from collecting. These figures don’t count gifts, which sometimes come in the form of pre-bought credit cards. When you add it all up to a yearly amount, its…a lot….

My dad, the model train/stamp/coin collector died 10½ years ago before I got into eBay, before I had the resources to greatly increase my collection. He was 77, so it wasn’t any greater a tragedy than any other death. But I really wish he could see my collection now. He’d love my few tobacco cards….

Focusing on pre-1972 cards, including some 75-100 year old cards, is great fun, but, given the budget noted above, limits me to very few new cards – sometimes only one – each month. I can hardly wait for the 2017 Topps Gypsy Queens to come out so I can have hundreds of cards to go through….

It hurts, but I might just have to suck it up and get a few of my cards graded. Not that I care what the grades will be – I suspect 2s on the tobacco cards and maybe 5s or 6s on the 1956 stars – but I might just need to know for CERTAIN that the cards I bought on eBay are authentic. I’m 93% sure, but still….

I haven’t bought individual packs for years – too much time and money to efficiently get a set. But I still love the kid-like thrill of finding out what I got. That’s why I sometimes buy lots on eBay without knowing the details of the contents. 100 card 1967 lot, VG+? I’m in…

I know it’s not a competition, but I get way too much of a kick out of seeing that the database has “1 listed in collections” and it’s mine! Or looking through some absolutely glorious collections that I could never hope to match (GWhy) and seeing that I have a card on that person’s want list….

I wonder if I’ll ever start buying post 1950 sets other than Topps….

I wonder if I’ll ever trade some of my nice-but-not-meaningful singles for other cards that I truly desire….

I wonder if I’ll actually get all the Topps base sets from 1965 to present? If so, when? Or will I lose interest in that and focus on other stuff?....

I wonder if I’ll ever officially stop collecting and start selling off my cards. Like when I’m 80 or something….

Ok, I’ll stop now.

V3

I probably spend somewhere between 50-60 dollars a month on cards right now.  Honestly typing that just now makes me feel like I may need to cut that back.  I just got back into this hobby about a year ago.  I only kept about 40 cards that were special enough for me to hang on to from when I used to collect as a child/teen.  I now have over 4800 unique cards, coming up on my last row of my second 3200 count BCW box.  I also have a small shoebox I am filling up with duplicates.  

I'm thinking I should probably begin to cut back on this, as I don't really want it to get out of hand in regards to cost and space.  I was buying a lot of older sets, and I may just start buying current releases only with the occasional single card purchase of older years.

nice ramble, thanks for sharing

I have used a card budget for years as well, which includes postage spent on trades.

it was pretty small when I was raising a family, and now a little looser since the kids are grown

nevertheless, I still enjoy tracking where I am on budget, and cutting back when over budget, and getting one more purchase in at end of the month when there is room..

for the most part, I trade modern cards and vintage, and buy mostly vintage, and nearly no new packs (although I do like the new stuff as well)

mark 

I'm on a very short leash, though I could easily afford about $30-$40 monthly without it affecting my life except in keeping me off the EZ Tag lane coming home. I started trading at around Christmas time this past year and my wife keeps track of how much I spend. So far it's been about $32 since December 2016 and for some reason she believes I must sell some cards to cover postage - that's the only reason I sell anything. I'd much rather trade than sell, but I'd also rather sell than enter into a cold war. I just sent off a package this week after holding it for about two weeks to ease the stress of facing the boss with another postage expenditure.

Anyway, I'm in between collecting vintage - thanks Gwhy, Zenko, Bizzork, Berton - and post-80s - thanks everyone else - and have seen my collection grow greatly, but more importantly I've recaptured the spirit of my youth by collecting again. The only thing that would make it better is finding that trunk in West Texas that contains my green file box with my mid-60s baseball and football cards to put with what I have now collected.

No monthly budget. If I like, I buy within reason.. My collection is supported by Sportslot and eBay sales pretty much. Unless I have to dip into my Fantasy Sports winnings. In an emergency, I have a bank account set aside  maintaining $100 monthly.

That is a can of worms, LOL. I used to spend about $100 a month when I got back in four years ago. Oh yeah oil was 140 US a barrel and money / work / "rich" people were all over the place and I was making some really good coin. We had plenty of money in the joint account all the bills were paid so why not. Then oil hits 27 US a barrel, the money / work / "rich" people disappeared and so did my $100 a month on cards. At the same time I was still a smoker (boo lol) and the government cranked up the tax on them and the province I bought them in made menthol illegal. Switched to another province and suddenly I was paying 160 CDN for one carton of smokes. Did that for three months and came home one day and told the wife, I was done and was quitting. I had done the math and it was CRAZY. My wife said I would never quit because of cost (proved her wrong), and now I am 16 months smoke free. LONG story short .......... six months after I quit the wife seen how much money we saved and gave me back my $100 a month budget. If you knew just HOW much I smoked the savings are gargantuan. =D

But ............. there is always a but. Things have been SO SLOW around here that the $100 budget only lasted four months and I had to slash it back to $50 a month. I was just "joking" with you guys last week about the two cards a month thing. Well sadly the only Ranford's left are the expensive ones so that is all I get. Last hobby stuff I bought was Boxing Day. Probably not much more until things pick up again. The next big thing is the card show in April in Edmonton so I am crossing my fingers that I get some cash to be able to go.

Probably thinking its yet another sad story but anyhoo ....... basically I would say when things were good $2500 a year, now that things not so good $1000 to $1200 .............. the wife keeps an eye on it so if I go to far she lets me know.

I'm at a point in my collection that lack of things to buy is more of a constraint than budget.  My highest priority wants number under 150, many of which I've been seeking for over 15 years.  My main PC is of Ted Musgrave.  For that collection, I've gotten three cards off of my want list in the last four years.  At that rate I can afford to overpay when something turns up...LOL!  Even my Press Pass Legends wants are only showing up about one per month.  With less than 40 cards to go, even those will get further between quickly.

When I'm on a hot streak I'll spend $100 or more in a month; but lately it's more often under $30 than over $100.  When I'm in a dry spell, I'll go lower on my priority list to scratch the itch.  Just yesterday I spent $12 on an oddball set just because I hadn't gotten anything at all in three weeks.  It was a little more than I wanted to spend, but it is a set that doesn't come up very often.  And the database needs the scans.

I have no card budget. I buy what I want and when I want it, as long as the price is right. I don't spend a bunch of money on cards though. I might spend hundreds some months (but usually boxes are involved when that happens) and then, other months I might not buy any boxes/packs/singles and only spend maybe $20 on shipping trades. I prefer to trade vs. buy, but I have to buy boxes/packs of cards to have stuff to trade. If I'm buying singles, they are for my collection and not for trading. Well mostly! A few times I have bought a card just to trade it to someone that I know needed it and had something I wanted in trade.

I don't spend a bunch of money in any given month though. If I see something come up that I want on ebay or another card-site that will go over $20, I look at the checkbook before I even decide to bid on it. Most of my ebay purchases are $5-$20 at a time. I have rarely ever bought single cards that cost me more than $40. The most I have ever spent for a single card was $187 for a dual-AU'd SN25 card of NASCAR drivers Jimmie Johnson and Jeff Gordon. A bit over a year later, I traded that card for a Jimmie Johnson AU'd Quad-MEM 1/1 card that would easily cost $250 to buy. The scans of both cards on this site are mine of the cards I had/have. I don't think I've spent $100+ on any other single card ever. My triple-digit purchases are usually for hobby boxes. I tend to use about $250 of my tax refund each year to buy a couple (or several) boxes of cards to bust open.

I try to keep my spending in-check, but I don't budget it. I don't make a bunch of money, but I also don't have a bunch of bills. As long as I know I have some money in the bank and cash/coins on-hand to cover emergency expenses, I'll buy cards here and there. If that expense happens, I won't buy cards until I put the money that I used back in my account. What I mean by coins is this: most of my change from in-store purchases (I use cash to buy things from stores) goes in the console of my car to use for later in-store purchases so I don't have to break a bill of any sort for just a few cents. The quarters always go in my "piggy-bank" and sometimes dimes do too. Once I get a full roll of coins, I wrap them and put them away until I absolutely need them for something. Several years ago, that stash of coins bought me a new refrigerator when mine unexpectedly burned out! Some would call that "penny-pinching", but there weren't any pennies involved!  Just smart planning on my part.

My budget for cards is a lot less than what it used to be before my health went south. I used to get one or two boxes of every single NBA and NASCAR set that came out. Including Ultimate and Exquisite collection. Now? I'm lucky to get a blaster a month. There are many times where that doesn't happen. (including last month) I usually save about $100 to $200 during the year to buy cards on the Black Friday sales. I would much rather buy a box than singles- to me that's not really fun, unless I am nearing the end on a set and need just a few I didn't get from my box to finish it off. On average, it comes out to $30 for most months of the year, but in August and September it's usually closer to 10. If that much. There are times I don't buy anything new in a month...Luckily, thanks to my fellow collectors and the huge stash I built up in the mid-2000s I can still keep new cards coming in during those lean times...and I have a stash of packs that I keep on hand to open when I get the need to open some cards. Some of my pack stash has been in my posession since 2013. I have gotten at least some new cards every month since February 2013. I'm extremely OCD so I do keep track. I couldn't tell you what I ate the day before yesterday, but I can tell you how many cards I've gotten in a month since I was a teenager. Mostly.

It's hard for me to set a budget because the price of the medicine I need to keep me alive fluctuates constantly. Some (most) months it's over $500. It's already forced me to give up my NASCAR diecast collection, which used to actually be my main collection ahead of cards, if you can imagine that. After paying for medicine and bills whatever I have left goes to my various hobbies. Cards are now #1, comics are #2. But luckily I have a family member who buys them for me, or else I would have been forced out of my original hobby as well.

I get a little thrill when I see a set I posted the checklist for show up on the Completed Gallery listing...a little less of a thrill when I look at it and see the wrong cards posted, usually parallels in the place of base cards. It happens often. I know with us all being human mistakes happen but I wish people would put more effort into doing it correctly.

I don't plan to ever stop collecting. I left the NBA from 2006-12 and I now consider it one of the worst mistakes I've ever made. I will collect for as long as my life lasts...while it's true that nobody is guarateed tomorrow, I have come pretty close due to health reasons already. (my family was told to say their final goodbye). Not trying to be a downer, but this is my daily life...something I deal with all the time. It's not a fun existence and doing my cards- be that sorting, scanning, writing about, etc-even just looking through the galleries on here- is just about the only thing that brings me any happiness. I live with multiple diseases and health issues, but none are communicable so please keep trading with me, lol.

it was actually in part due the Database that I got back in to the NBA. I had begun watching the games regularly again during the 2011-12 season, but in October 2012 when I started entering my collection on here it brought back a lot of great memories, and rekindled my love for collecting- something that was never truly extinguished but 2007-11 were lean years for me in the hobby....in 2008 I only documented 14 new cards for the entire year, for example. I've already added 12 in this very month of March! Some a gift from a fellow blogger and some from a pack that I had purchased in February and opened yesterday.

It's also because of the Database that I took up hockey. The thread on here about the Golden Knight's logo got me curious, so I put on NHL Network to see what the logo was...and I ended up getting hooked. It's already moved past NASCAR into my #2 favorite sport slot, and I have not missed a night of watching it since sometime in November. It's become something that my day feels incomplete if I didn't watch some hockey...usually a couple of games a night thanks to my mom buying me Center Ice last month. On 2/28 I saw my first Hurricanes game which means that I've now seen all 30 teams. Back in the day with the NBA I didn't see all 29 teams (at that time) until my second full season, third overall. Now that I get League Pass as a gift every year I usually watch all 30 teams a week.

My dad was not a card collector- I think he bought a grand total of two packs in his entire life- but he would probably have liked the internet for the large amounts of scantily clad women available to see with the click of the mouse. LOL. We had the computer two years before he lost his battle with cancer but he never wanted to use it. I sometimes wonder what it would be like if my father and grandmother had lived long enough to have a Facebook account. It would have been interesting and probably somewhat embarassing, that's for sure. Honestly though I think he would see some of the crap posted on Facebook, say "This is Bull---", and never log in again. My dad collected car parts. Used car parts. We have no idea why but he had, for example, collected more than 200 used windshield wipers. We are still trying to figure out how he got the bus engine home. It would not have fit in his car, yet there it was. (he worked at a bus company on the weekends, for the USPS during the week- if you got mail in Westchester County, NY, in the 1980s through 2002 you can thank him, because he kept the trucks in running order) The head on the engine was cracked so he probably got it out of the garbage, or whatever they do with broken engines. I don't have the mechanical knowledge or skills that he did. But I'll always wonder how he got it here.

I am more like spaz' way of buying.  I am not on a limited budget being retired with half of a good pension (theotehr half goes to the ex).  I also teach part time so most of that money is extra for entertainment or cards.  The bank account ishealthy sowhenI gettheopportunity tomake a goodpurchase,I dosuch as today.  I am driving down to Toronto to pick up some 1957, 1959,1960 and a couple of 1970 OPC cards for my sets. I have a friend who buys and sells cards and has always given me great deals on cards (this is another one). He has many more that I need but that will wait till I know I have surplus cash. 

In short, it is not a budget by the month, but more whenever there is surplus and an opportunity. Other than that, the trading on this site is giving me sufficient enjoyment in the hobby that I don't need to buy on a regularly basis.

If anyone is interested in my friend's website for possibly finding some older cards, just ask.