I cant afford another year like this.....

I needed some money in 2006 and sold 90% of my collection... This was before the hype of the Marvel Movieverse and My Journey Into Mystery 83 in cgc 6.5 went for peanuts on ebay, as did my Strange Tales 135 in 9.2. The bulk of the collection was Byrne related, and selling it got me thru the hump. Fast forward 7 years and a relative who owned a record store was selling on Ebay and asked me for help listing is vinyl. I happened to put in Comics in the ebay search engine and the the seed was planted.

My very first purchase was Byrne's revamp of The Atom, I found an auction with issues 1-9 and "bought it now for 7.00. Then I saw that Jon Sable had a reboot and I bought the Bloodtrail series, issues 1-6 for 11.00. What fun to buy comics again and for less than cover price! Unfortunately, I didn't even get thru these issues as they didn't come close to bringing back the memories of the great Byrne copper age issues or the original Grell stories and art.... but I was hooked.

I started off looking for deals--- and bought mostly silver age lots and issues that I had read as kid. I'm "only" 45 so most of this stuff was read as friend's reader copies or TPB collections originally, but I thought that maybe there was some investment possibilities.

I decided to try to collect X-men 1-143 and Spiderman 1-100 raw copies. I spent about a month making mostly great purchases, but there were a few over graded bbooks that left a sour taste in my mouth. ALl in all, I won 77 auctions in January and within those were 15 cgc graded books.

Little by little I came to understand the true GAMBLE of over spending on raw keys....I could handle the gamble of getting an over or undergraded book, but the more I bought and studied, the more I realized that without actually holding the book, there would be NO WAY to certify that I wasn't looking at a restored/qualified book unless I depended on a third party grader.

Thankfully, I had only bought 2 PGX books before I did a few google searches on the difference between the two companies. To this day, I am simple stunned to see thousands or even hundreds being sold for a PGX graded book. Talk about an unnecessary gamble!

Anyway, 2013 has come and gone, and nearly 500 cgc books later, I have rebuilt the majority of my collection and still look wistfully at the lost money on the JIM 83 and others... but I was smart enough to hold onto my raw Hulk 181 in maybe 9.0 grade and several copies of all 75 (gaiman) Sandman issues--- maybe Jospeh Gordon Levitt can make my patience finally pay off.

I cannot duplicate the spending spree I went on this year--- but then again, I have purchased a lot of what I aimed to procure, and now storage and a questioning wife is starting to become an issue.

I am thankful to be a part of this community and appreciate reading, watching, competing and most of all learning to become a better collector.

I know my goal for 2014 is to be even more selective--- no more impulse buys!

Best of luck to all of you for a healthy and Happy New Year!

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