Your beloved ‘80s and ‘90s baseball cards won’t make much profit. The nature of how these cards were collected plays a part in that; you didn't look for the most successful or elusive card, you treasured the card featuring your favorite player and hoarded anything with his face on it.
That doesn’t mean that the collectors deem his cards as valuable. The most prized cards will only net you around $40, even if they are professionally graded and sealed.
If you picked up a collectible spoon on your latest visit to Niagara Falls, I hope you weren’t intending to sell it when global warming destroys the waterfalls in the coming years.
The silver spoon isn’t fully silver, and since they were mass-produced, the market would be saturated with thousands of precious spoons picked up by other tourists with the same plan as you.
Grandma and Grandpa have given you a keepsake Christmas ornament in the shape of a car every year. Now you’re all grown up and in a financial pinch—do you dare hawk your childhood treasures on eBay?
You’re better off leaving your ornaments on the Christmas tree instead of posting them online; most “collectable” ornaments are mass-produced and don’t have resale value. Why are they called “collectable” in the first place? It’s all a marketing ploy that started in the ‘70s.
You were watching TV late one night when a commercial caught your eye. You—yes, you—could be the owner of a rare coin marking the 200th anniversary of Lewis and Clark’s adventure! Or President Obama’s inauguration!
Whatever the event is, you felt compelled to buy the commemorative coin because the announcer said there were only 1000 produced and it could be a collector’s item someday. Unfortunately, they aren’t worth what you paid for; these “gold” coins are often gold plated and the authenticity certificates are about as official as a cereal box diploma.
These tiny metal cars were a prized possession from your childhood, despite the countless times your bare foot was impaled by your little hot rod. There’s a special box in the attic collecting dust for the day your Hot Wheels will finally be worth a dime.
I probably shouldn’t tell you that one of these miniature cars will only fetch a single penny on Amazon. Your one-in-a-million Hot Wheel is probably one in a literal million: hundreds of new Hot Wheel models are released every year, and there are countless numbers of each one hidden in toy boxes across America.
Any child growing up in the 1990s had only one mission to accomplish: they had to catch ‘em all. Between playing the video games, begging mom for the stuffed toys, and trying to get their hands on the kid’s meal toy that turned out to be a choking hazard, Pokemon was everywhere. Many young adults still have binders full of cards organized by number.
As a kid, you thought that if you came across something shiny or foreign, you had something special. But in most cases, the holographic Gyarados card was in every booster pack, not just yours. Even if you did luck out and find a rare card, you're still not holding on to a gold mine. These days, even the rarest of Pokemon cards will catch a measly $35.00.
'80s kids will remember asking Santa for a Cabbage Patch Kid. Parents of '80s kids will remember risking their lives in a stampede of rabid adults who just wanted to make their kid happy on Christmas Day.
Cabbage Patch Kids were the “it toy” of the '80s and sold for $25 a pop; even though an uber-rare doll sold for nearly $1,5000 on eBay, your well-worn childhood friend will likely get you $10 online.
The advent of digital video and music brought a revolution. People clamored to buy the complete discography of their favorite artist or grab every season of Friends on DVD. Investing $50 into a single season of a nine-season TV show seemed like a good idea at the time. Unlike VHS cassettes, DVDs could withstand sitting under the carport during the scalding summer months.
In the end, neither could stand a chance to the behemoth that is Netflix. Why pay hundreds for every episode of Friends when you can marathon them all for under $10 a month—and you don’t even have to change out the disks!
These little porcelain figures are simply precious. Their round, doe eyes and smiling faces adorn the sitting rooms and mantles of many homes in America.
When you’re looking to make a quick buck, don’t assume the figure you spent nearly $50 on will get you anything. Precious Moment figures sell for as little as two bucks on Amazon.
Like most relics from the ‘90s, your old Beanie Baby collection has the monetary value of a dresser full of mom jeans, fanny packs, and a well-worn Bel Biv Devoe CD. Since the pellet-stuffed plushes were all the rage twenty years ago, we all assumed they would rake in a future fortune.
In reality, you won’t scrape together more than lunch money for the majority of Beanie Babies. Unless you happen to have a Korean Pinchers, which fetches $1,800 on the collector’s market.
