Your Next 5 MOVES As A Sports Memorabilia Collector!

Today's video is all about your next five moves in the sports memorabilia industry. I borrowed this headline here from my boy Patrick David. If you don't follow him on YouTube this guy is an iconic collector. Je just sold two Wayne Gretzky rookie cards for I think 2 million dollars or something like that. So make sure you follow him over there on valuetainment. He's got a new book out called your next five moves and I was thinking “wow, what would my next five moves be as a memorabilia collector?”

So 2020 was definitely a very interesting year in the world and also in the memorabilia business as well. I remember driving down to Branson, Missouri and hearing that the NBA season was getting canceled and my first initial thought was like “Oh crap”. Are people gonna be buying this stuff? Am I gonna have to do something else? What if people aren't watching the games, are they going to be interested in the players and the teams? All that kind of stuff, and that's where my mind initially went, and of course 2020 ended up being just a crazy year. One of my better years, so I'm definitely thankful for that, but it got me thinking about what can we do to help kind of protect ourselves in case something does drastically happen. The market does a downturn, or we need to diversify, or we need to pivot in different ways.

So that's what today's video is all going to be about. What your next five moves should be in the memorabilia industry.

#1: Find out what you already own

I guarantee you, most of you have never done an inventory count of what you actually have. You need to go through what you have and find out exactly what it is. Do an excel spreadsheet. Take some notes. However you want to count what you have, I guarantee you'll find something that you totally forgot about. We can't go through steps two through five until we actually have an actual inventory count of what we have. So that's what number one is all about. Like any business does at the end of the year, get an inventory count of what you actually have in your collection.

#2: Find out what your items are worth

You need to get an appraisal. There are actually a few companies out there that do appraisals so find out what your stuff is worth and get it fully insured in case something happens to it. I did a video with my insurance rep David Dale, you can go back and watch that video for some tips on getting your collectibles insured. You don't need to use him. Use your own guy if you want to it's entirely up to you. Choose someone you're comfortable with, but get your collectibles absolutely insured in case something happens to them. It's super cheap, you'll be thanking me if say something does happen.

#3: Trim the fat

There's stuff that you bought five or ten years ago that you are no longer interested. What's that worth? Can you sell that to facilitate maybe buying your Holy Grail piece? How much do you think is actually sitting in those items that you have that you no longer care about? Probably a decent amount. Do a garage sale and you sell some stuff, and you're like “wow, at the end of the day I had a $1,000 I sold of stuff that I didn't even use, didn't even know I had.” There's probably a few thousand dollars’ worth of stuff sitting around that you can sell to buy stuff that you actually like in 2021. So let's start with the process of finding out what we have, finding out what it's worth, and step three trimming the fat of stuff that we know we don’t need.

On a side note, there's a lot of positivity here in the hobby. There's also a lot of negativity too. Start trimming the fat of those people that are not bringing any positive influences. Whether you'll be on social media or wherever it is in the collectible industry, get rid of those people, focus on people that are trying to help you, and remaining positive with you and your collection. Something that you get some sort of benefit out of. Just as another side note, limit the quality of relationships you have. Get rid of those negative ones.

#4: Get educated about other collectibles

2020 saw the rise of soccer cards, Pokémon cards, graded video games. I mean there's just so much to collect now which is great, but it can cause a lot of confusion and a lot of anxiety with people. They feel like they're missing the boat on certain stuff, but I want you just to pick one collectible that you don't already collect whether that's Pokémon cards, graded video games, whatever it is that interests you, and I want you to become fully educated on that topic. Watch YouTube videos on it. Whatever you need to do to become fully educated on that topic, and again, pick something that you're interested in. Don't just pick something out there because your favorite Instagram account said you needed to collect that. Whether you buy autographs or you're maybe a huge basketball fan doing basketball cards, played soccer in college so you want to do soccer cards, whatever it is. If you're a nerd, do the video games, but just become fully educated on one thing. The point of doing step four and step five is so we can start to diversify our collections in case we have a downturn when maybe an NBA season isn't being played, or   another season's not going on, or Pokémon cards are taken off, or Pokémon cards go down. Whatever it is we want to diversify our collection in case a player gets injured. Again, pick something that you're interested in not just because some other guy says to do it.

#5: Set yourself up to buy your Holy Grail Piece

I want you to set yourself up in 2021 to buy your Holy Grail piece. Steps one through four are going to help us do that. Now depending on what your Holy Grail piece is, this may not be happening in 2021, but we're going to start the process here in 2021. I bet you guys would love to have a Michael Jordan autographed jersey in your collection. Just using that as an example. Those are thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars. You may not be able to afford those right now. Maybe you want a rare Pokémon card but you can’t afford that right now, but ask yourself, first off what is your Holy Grail piece? What is the one item that you're like “I absolutely have to have this in my collection”? This is what I want. How would you feel if that was in your collection? Think about that for a second. How would you feel if that item was in your collection, you could show it off to your buddies, show it off to your family, and be really proud of what that piece is. Whatever it is, it can be an expensive piece or non-expensive piece, whatever that is think about how that would make you feel.

So number one we've identified what our Holy Grail piece is and number two we gotta have the funds available to actually purchase that piece. So we've already started going through our collection, we're selling off unwanted items and we're figuring out the dollar amount that we can actually get for those items so we can go sell them. Let's say your Holy Grail piece is $5,000 and let's say you've got unwanted items there of $2,000 that you're selling off. Now you've got $3,000 left over that you have to save for. Do you think you can save $250 a month for 12 months? Maybe you do $100 for two years. Do you think you can do that? I think most of us could probably do that. That's going to put you at that 5k and that's going to get you your Holy Grail piece. It's just really that simple.

You've got to budget and buy within your means. Notice how none of this stuff involves us putting anything on a credit card. We're not doing that. We're not going into debt to buy autographs for trading cards. Never do that. This stuff is not that necessary. I don't want these pieces to be a burden on you. So again, those numbers may change depending on what your Holy Grail pieces are, but always buy within your budget. You may be able to do in 2021, it might be a 2022 piece, but I would set this process up for you to start getting rid of the unwanted stuff and then figure out how much extra money you've got to save up in order to get to that Holy Grail piece. Then find out what that is per month, so say for the next year, and what you can actually save to put in a separate account. It's called your Holy Grail account and keep saving up for that, and you'd be surprised how quickly you will get to that Holy Grail piece!

Then just imagine you've got that piece in your collection. Like how cool is that, something that you thought was maybe five or ten years down the road, BOOM, one to two years, you've got it in your collection, because you took some action to actually get there.

So those are my next five moves that I would do as a collector in 2021 to kind of help clean up your collection. Get rid of some unwanted fat, and move you towards collecting that Holy Grail piece which we all want to have in our collection.