Obviously you have to have spare bedroom in your house to store these big boxes.
Let’s say with tax (you are in MD) you get these on sale for $ 100.00 each and you buy 100 in 1985. Sealed in the box these are selling for around $1000 to $1500 on ebay today.
So - $ 10,000 in stock index fund or buy 100 of these and keep them for 29 years in your house. What would have been a better investment in 1985?
It looks close, depending on exactly when you would have bought and sold. 1985 was a time of pretty high interest rates though - you probably could have gotten a 30 year bond with a return close to that annualized return too.
It looks like the DOW has gone up 1331% since January 4, 1985, going from around $1,100 to $16,960.57 as of last Friday (July 25, 2014).
The S&P500 has gone up 1089% in the same time period, from $163 to $1978.34 as of last Friday.
In contrast, the GI Joe Aircraft Carrier has only gone from $90 (to be charitable, I’ll use the lower cost basis) to $1,500 in the best case scenario in the same period.
I’ll take the stock index fund, please (there are also tax advantage considerations at play here).
Once you started unloading sealed boxes of the toy, the price would plummet according to supply and demand. Collectibles value are largely due to their scarcity and when something considered scarce becomes exposed as much less so, prices plummet.
If you lived in Ottumwa in 1985, that “must have” Beanie Baby and that Reggie Jackson Rookie Card seemed impossibly scarce, but the moment eBay came along, it not only exposed those things as plentiful, it all but killed the hobbies singlehandedly.
I thought about that and as a long term eBay seller I’m well aware that there is a market saturation point. There’s seems to be a robust market for these but it’s an open question how many at a time you could drop on the ebay market and still maintain top collectible prices.
Skip those and buy some Berkshire Hathaway-A.
$1275 in Jan 1985.
192,000 or so in 2014.
What Lamar said. You might get 1500 for the first 4 or 5 boxes, but then the market is going to get wise that the item isn’t quite so rare as it was.
Hang on to your 10k until Feb 1990 and load up on the Cisco IPO. Let it ride until the Mar 23, 2000 stock split and then dump it over the next week.
10 million and change before the tax man takes his cut.
ETA: Or still 3.5 mil today if you didn’t get out before the dot com bubble burst.
Is the OP a reader of the Questionable Content webcomic? Today’s strip, which went up right around the time as the post, had a punchline involving the GI Joe aircraft carrier.
Good point. The value of collectibles is largely driven by supply and demand just like other products. One obvious major reason why there are so few intact 1980’s toys today is that they got played with a lot, stepped on, had parts lost during moves, and sometimes got thrown away when the owner was no longer interested in it.
If a large number of intact boxes suddenly appear on the market, they are going to be gobbled up by collectors who have always wanted one. After that, many of those collectors will be satisfied and will be less interested in buying another - making the price fall.
Where are you going to store 100 7 foot long toys for 30 years?
In the fridge, next to the elephants.
From the OP
“obviously you have to have spare bedroom in your house to store these big boxes.”
So there is the loss for 29 years of an entire room of your house to factor in.
*You can’t store elephants in the refrigerator!! *
They’ll leave footprints in the butter.
