M ONEY & FIN AN C E
COLLECTIBLES This month, we will look at collectibles. With all of the reality shows about finding treasure in your basement, collectibles have become a much talked about subject in our everyday lives. The story of having a very valuable piece of furniture, stamps, artwork and coins, or even baseball cards, has happened frequently and, we need to know how to identify something that may be valuable before you clean out your basement or help someone move and start de-cluttering your house, a family or a friend’s. There are two parts of the story. The first part is someone who collects something in a very formal way. That something can be coins, stamps, art, antiques, jewelry, glass and many other types of collectables. Some collections are very formal and categorized, photographed, insured and inventoried by the collector. They may buy and sell their collection or they may just accumulate the collection. The next type is someone that collects certain items and accumulates them, but collects the items because they like them. They do not catalogue them and they do not sell them. They just enjoy collecting the category and do not look at it as a wealth building tool; they look at it as accumulating the item because they enjoy having the item. This type of collector also can be someone that has collected certain items like antiques and has no idea of their value and may have a very valuable piece of furniture or artwork in their basement and have no clue about its value. This is what you find on “Picker” or “Roadshow” type of reality television show. This can also be someone who has inherited somebody’s possessions and may think that they have junk and with some research they find out that they actually have some treasure. For what we will call the intentional collector, there are certain things that
40 | Dec
2014