Collectibles

Value Myths 1

I just got through watching a Robot Chicken skit satirizing on that value myth of Beanie Babies. After that, a suspicious thought occurred to me. (NOT about Robot Chicken! YOU guys are safe...) It's about these so-called collectible items of value that I'm suspicious about. And discovering these "value" myths makes me angry. Geez! This feels like the stock market all over again, or betting ALL your money on the horse you thought would win "guaranteed." This is just robbery, to be selling these collectible items at outrageous prices, and then they're worth nothing 5 years later. It's like we're buying antique jewelry and furniture, instead of a cutesy toy collection. I bet if you found these on say, Craigslist, or dropped off by someone in a thrift shop, they'd be priced so inexpensively. Even if they were "new" and "untouched."

Beanie Babies

Don't get me wrong! I absolutely adored these cute Beanie Babies as a kid. At the time, they were $7 each, or so Grandma told me. Grandma (along with some other relatives) made her value investment in these too, buying some in those protective display cases, warning me not to remove the heart poem tags, or "they wouldn't be worth anything anymore" However when my younger siblings were born, they got several Beanie toys with the tags removed. Hypocrites. And I once bought a collector's book in early 2000 too (had lots of nice Beanie recipes in it), which identified which Beanies were "retired," and some estimating their (alleged) value to be in the hundred's or even thousand's by 2008! Now you can buy them again in the grocery store, and I'm told their value is worthless now.

State Quarters

I collected these gradually in an album for 10 years, not for their potential value, but for the pure fun of collecting them, and completed my collection. When Grandma collected and ordered at least 5 whole set of 50 state quarters (1 for me, 4 for my younger siblings) she went so far as to wear those delicate white gloves (like those handbell players wear) to keep her fingerprints from devaluing their worth. And now all these different state quarters have become as numerous as pennies and grain sand etc. and have been acceptable as regular currency. I wonder who saw that coming a mile away? Grandma sure was well-meaning investing in items she thought was of value at the time, but she (along with everybody else) isn't perfect at how we should invest our money, or valuable assets. No one is.

I miss a lot of the old school collectible stuff, and hope to find them in my lifetime, at reasonable prices, and not these jacked-up high prices which are only privileges of rich people. When I die and leave these so-called "treasures" of mine behind. I want my family to do this: keep what they like, if not, sell what's valuable; if it's hardly worth anything, then donate it, so someone less fortunate can enjoy these treasures that I once did. That's all I ask...