I Can’t Wait for “Some Day”

Does anyone want to give me $1,000,000 for my Beanie Babies? $999,999.99? I’m willing to make a deal here, people, so don’t delay.

Included in the long series of bad advice I’ve followed over the years is, “Save these. They’ll be worth a fortune one day.” When I was a kid, and a young adult, and a not-so-young adult who should have known better, I was a sucker for stories about somebody who found an old piece of junk in the basement and it turned out to be a $Zillion antique.

I was just like that guy, by which I mean that I had a basement, too. Clearly, I was already halfway home on the road to untold riches. All I needed to do was squirrel away a ton of items that I could uncover in the future and cash in for a condo on Easy Street.

And so I saved essentially everything with any kind of potential, which meant essentially everything I ever owned. Baseball cards, comic books, old toys and games, movie posters, stamps, coins…you name it. I’m just waiting for that absolutely guaranteed day when, “They’ll be worth a fortune.”

Mad Magazine? Got it. Actually, I have pretty much every issue from most of two decades. Fantastic Four? Spiderman? Sgt. Fury? Membership card from the Merry Marvel Marching Society? Step right up and make a deal. 100% rare, rare, rare McDonald’s Teenie Beanie Babies from 1999 Happy Meals? You bet, and they’re still in their original containers, waiting for a happy, and teenie, new home.

Proof sets? Yup. Stamps? Of course, even that defective one with the airplane flying upside down. (J.K. Just my luck to get the stamps that were printed correctly.) I even saved that “Treasure Chest” volume of “Real Men’s Entertainment” that my Uncle Louie gave me when I was a teenager, but only for historical research purposes, of course.

Now in my dotage, I’ve been looking for ways to cash in on my booty—not that booty, the other one—and I’ve discovered the tiny, minute, infinitesimally small flaw in my plan. It turns out that everyone else read the same story about that guy who found a one-of-a-kind baseball card in his basement and they started saving all their crap, too.

Even worse, the hotshots in the collectible world have moved on from real stuff to “non-fungible tokens” and crypto. The hot markets for all my collections peaked roughly three minutes after I started saving them.

As I like to tell my kids, learn from my mistakes. Toss all your Beanie Babies and stamps and coins and all that other flotsam from your youth. The hottest new collectibles are Blackberry charging cables, rotary phones and serving platters shaped like fish. Also on the rise among collectors: spark plug gapping tools, floppy disks, and any appliance in avocado green.  

This list of collectibles is 100% guaranteed to do as much good for our readers as my own list did for me. In the meantime, how about $500k for those Beanie Babies? $35.95?
 
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