To some extent I agree with you, but the Sunk Cost Fallacy is a real thing.
I'm 50-ish minutes from turning 66 years old. I've already outlived
most of my contemporaries and the collectors I knew personally are
either dead or lost interest long ago. In good conscience, I simply
can't avoid dealing with all my junk *now*.
I don't have energy or resources - the space requirement alone has
skyrocketed in cost the last few years - to continue to collect physical
examples of my computing interests. For my own economic security I've
started divesting. I plan to 90% cash out while I'm physically able and
while I'm able to enjoy whatever return that brings.
Much, much more important than the money, though, is the impact leaving
a large collection would have on my descendants. News Flash:
THESE TREASURES ARE THEIR TRASH.
It would be unconscionable for me to put any expectation on them to
"properly" dispose of my computers. To do so would require a silly
amount of self-education for them to know even what these things ARE,
much less what they're worth and where to sell them.
At this time I'm culling my collection on paper. Evaluating what I want
to keep, what I can reasonably *afford* to curate, what I can
effectively emulate, and current value. What I paid for any of it is
absolutely irrelevant.
My longer term plan is to die with one Uhaul load or less of Stuff, and
a detailed inventory of what's there, including current value and
current best venue for sales.
My daughter also has contact info for a friend who will post here and a
couple of other places if she wants somebody to just come take it off
her hands.
Doc
On 6/26/24 16:04, Teo Zenios via cctalk wrote:
When you sell it as a lot all you are doing is taking pennies on the
dollar and the buyer gets all the profit. If collecting starts to
decline the buyer still makes money, if the hobby goes up they make even
more money.
The issue starts to suck more if you actually paid a pretty penny for
your collectables and then want to cash out. Plenty of people started
collecting what was pretty much trash (before e-waste was even a thing
and Ebay didn't exist yet) and those people will make out well either way.
I remember as a teen going to a coin/stamp shop and seeing people in
suits show up to buy the place out with a suitcase full of cash for
maybe $15% of catalog value when stamp collecting was going crazy in the
early 1980's. Granted he probably would have been better off auctioning
his best stuff at that time and burning the rest as collecting has been
going down every year since (except for some rarities here and there).
-----Original Message----- From: Sellam Abraham via cctalk
Sent: Wednesday, June 26, 2024 12:59 PM
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
Cc: Sellam Abraham
Subject: [cctalk] Re: Revocable Living Trust for Computer Collectors
On Wed, Jun 26, 2024 at 9:31 AM Teo Zenios via cctalk
<cctalk@classiccmp.org>
wrote:
Ditching a collection is a full time job. It took you so many years to
put
it together and it will take the same amount of time to part it out if
you
expect to get any real money out of it (unless you sell the most wanted
items and recycle the rest).
This is very true, as I discovered when I began selling off (what remained
of) my collection in 2017. I thought I'd get it all out in a year or so.
It's been 7 years and I'm still at it, with no real end in sight. Granted
I haven't been working on it diligently, and I still ended up with 40
pallets of stuff after the Great Vintage Computing Heist of 2012, but
disgorging a large collection is in fact a major undertaking, unless you're
willing to sell it all at one price, and can find such a buyer to take it
in one lot.
Sellam
