I was watching Antiques Roadshow which presents numerous accounts of someone buying a painting or lamp or something for a pittance and then discovering it is worth thousands of dollars. Other than real estate, I don’t think I’ve ever sold something for more than I paid for it. Do you have any cool stories of buying something and reselling it for a profit? For the purposes of this thread, let’s not include real estate or investment vehicles like stocks or bonds.
In the 80s, i bought cameras, fixed them up, and resold them. Modest profit most of the time
I bought a dusty box of old Leica gear for a few hundred, didn’t know if i could clean or fix to do more than break even. But it’s fun, right?
Well, on doing my research of exactly what i had, there was one fairly rare lens it the box. A red enamel Elmar in M39 mount. I more than tripled my profit with that one lens.
At a garage sale, I bought a nice looking and huge camera bag stuffed with other bags for $5
Inside one of the other bags was a Minolta XD-11 with a 50mm 1.4 and the fantastic 250mm f/5.6 Rokkor X mirror lens. So, I went back to the garage sale in the interest of fairness.
They said it was granny’s old stuff, didn’t work, and they knew it was in there,
So… I kept it. Turns out all it needed was a new battery.
There was also a Minolta flash meter and a Gossen Luna Pro in one of the other bags
I have sold a number of collectibles that did very well. Watt Pottery was my domain. Once early in the history of collecting Watt, and well before the high prices took over, I bought a small collection from a lady who contacted me. I paid around $250 for a dozen pieces so 20 bucks or so for each one. As it turns out one of the pieces was the coffee server designed by noted designer Eva Zeisel. My interview with her and the subsequent chapter in my book on Watt Pottery is a personal highlight. No one had any idea she was connected to Watt including herself (she had forgotten who she made the wares for).
Anyway I sold the coffee server a few years later at an auction and it brought $1500 without the unique, never-to-be found-by-itself lid. A few weeks later I found a lid at a small country antique shop in rural Pennsylvania for a dollar. I knew the dealer who had purchased the coffee server and I called him up and he bought the lid for $500.
So $21 dollars to $2000.
At an auction I once bought a lump of gold colored metal that some made into a necklace hanging, sort of looked like a nugget, but it had different shades of gold in different spots and no markings. It looked pretty crude, and no one wanted to take a chance and bid on it, so I got it for like $50.
When I bought my house, I took all of my gold jewelry to a place known to pay top dollar for meltdown scrap. They knew exactly what it was, a bunch of gold rings and dodads of different purity melted down by a blowtorch, most likely by someone who stole it. They paid me like $450 for it.
It was not a big total, but percentage wise, it was a bundle.
Based on her photo equipment tastes, I think I would’ve liked Granny. But she had passed away…
Gosh. I find that object quite unattractive.
I got into Magic The Gathering back in the mid 90’s. I bought a lot of cards. I once bought a pack of ten cards for $2.50. One of the cards was a dual land (a volcanic island). I sold it a year or two back for $500.
At a garage sale, I bought a KISS trashcan for $1. I sold it shortly there after for $125.
I haven’t done much flea market or garage sale hunting in recent years. I’m curious if in the age of the internet, such deals can still be found.
Back in the day I used to buy things like Betamax VCRs cheap, clean them up and sell them online for a hefty profit.
But thrift stores eventually figured out their value (by looking them up on eBay I presume) and people doing garage sales no longer seemed to have them to make going around worthwhile.
I regret to this day selling a really nice Super Beta SL-HF900 despite what I got for it.
Amazingly, we made money when we sold one of our boats. When we bought it, we got a really good deal - the owner just wanted to be rid of it. We had it for maybe 8 years, then sold it for about $20K more than we paid for it - enough to buy a newer boat for cash. That just never happens with boats, well, not often anyway.
A house. Bought at the right time and sold at the right time - by happenstance, mostly. It’s not like I’m a flipper, it just worked out for me. It financed my midlife crises … which I’m still surfing the last waves of.
Back in the early days of eBay, before everyone learned to look up the potential value of items, I saw a liquid oxygen breathing system (the ones you put over your should and use if you have severe breathing issues) for $15 at a thrift store. I thought “hmm… medical equipment, that’s GOT to be valuable” so I bought it and listed it on eBay. I think it sold for over $500 to someone who sold used medical equipment.
I tend to buy a couple packs of baseball cards every spring in anticipation of the season. In the early 2000s, Topps had a card where you won 2 tickets to any game on the schedule.
I went on eBay, and noticed that they were selling for maybe $30 (it could be more, I can’t remember). I bought as many as I could afford, and cashed them all in for September Yankee-Red Sox games at the end of the season. I made a bundle. eBay was a different place back then!
Not sure if this counts, but I sold my car during the chip shortage a few years back. The buyout on the lease was $18,000 and the dealership gave me $27,000. Paid off the lease and put nine grand in my pocket.
A few years back, graphics cards for computers were extremely scarce between multiple factors. Some people got into hardcore buying cards and scalping them but I didn’t get into that. What I did do was I’d find a lead on a new GPU, call it GPU A, and buy it for standard retail. Say $650. Then six weeks later get a lead on GPU B (better), buy it for $799 and sell GPU A for $825. Then later buy GPU C for $999 and sell GPU B for $1,025.
By the end of it, I had a couple pretty high end video cards for the price of a couple entry level cards.
I don’t have any cool stories. Back in 2000, Marvel launched Ultimate Spider-Man which reimagined the character as if he was brand new. Reimagined might be a stretch, but it was a new series where Peter Parker had just become Spider-Man and was still in high school. It did extremely well and they produced enough comic books to meet demand. A few years later I sold off my copies of the first 10 or so issues for a few hundred dollars.
I didn’t buy it but a re-sold a toy for a friend that I’m positive their mom bought at a garage sale. In fact it was only 2 pieces of a 4-piece toy that my friend had. And I happened to go to a large local toy sale and find the other 2 pieces for like $5. I sold it on eBay for $80. (it was this)
I also bought a vintage Little Tikes Washer & Dryer that my nieces played with for about 2 minutes then lost interest. I probably bought it for $30 and sold it on eBay for $100. Yes I boxed it up and shipped it!
The last thing I made a bunch of money on was boxed Strawberry Shortcake dolls I bought locally for I think $45 for all 3. I sat on them for a long time then recently looked them up and sold them for a total of $200. That was fun!
Oh, and I went through all of my old 90s concert shirts and sold them. Pearl Jam and stuff. They went for between $35 and $250 each. I sold my boyfriend’s Nirvana tour shirts for $1000 each. So, not stuff that I bought and flipped but rather old shit I had laying around that was worth a lot!
I’m pretty sure every boat (kayak, canoe, aluminum fishing boat, pontoon) I’ve resold after using it for a few seasons has made me money. I like to look for good deals, so I sometimes buy a boat I do not need. I’ve bought a kayak for $50, used it as an extra (for friends to use), then resold it a few years later for $80.
My pontoon boats I’ve always bought because they were a great deal. I clean them up, use them a few years, then sell. I’m never in a hurry to sell, so I hold out and get a good price, always a profit.
I accepted a boat as repayment for a debt and turned that around quickly. Not so much a huge profit as an unexpected return since I didn’t think I’d ever get paid back at all.
I want a pontoon boat. Everybody ends up partying on one of those at the end of the day.
I wanted to buy a 2nd car; something sporty. I was especially interested in mid-engine sports cars. Then I read that Acura NSX values had been steady for 10 years. If that continued, I could buy one, drive it for a year and sell it, and only lose the cost of insurance and maintenance. So I bought a ‘93 in 2010 but NSX values didn’t hold steady; they went up and up. I sold it in 2016 and made $10k!
Definitely not what I expected. For years afterward I kinda patted myself on the back for making money on that car, but recently I saw how much values have climbed since I sold it. I could have made another $30-50K if I kept it longer. Maybe I’m not so sharp.
Bought a hard cover book of the top 100 Billboard songs for each week of the 1970’s. Each week had 2 pages, an exact reproduction of each list on one page and a description of the music industry for that week on the other. Paid a $1 for it. A few years later I listed it on Ebay and it got bids right from the start. Sold for $895. I asked the buyer what made that book so valuable, he said only 30 hardcover copies were printed and those went to music industry executives. He didn’t believe me when I told him I found it at a garage sale. I Googled the buyer and found he was a well known music producer and had worked with some of the top act of the time.