Why not just put the money into a bank or investment vehicle instead? You clearly don’t know how most regular people behaves especially in the West where the urge to consume is also presumed and never doubted. The whole point of this is to reserve for something that your other, inner self is going to be too lazy to sell at least when not desperate enough. This reserve in order for it to be effective it has to be of a certain composition. Things that you and the potential buy now or in the future will likely want. This means whatever it is it has to have some nostalgic and historical appear as well as scarcity that you can’t easily find anymore on the market. People love to say “oh, that’s just worth a few bucks” yet they will try to buy it and then ask you if you have any more of it. The thing about scarcity is not always about the supply side “authorized shares” or “issued shares.” It’s about the float. If you desire something and believe in it, you will go out of your way to find it and in large quantities if possible. Unfortunately, whether you find these items in mass quantities at reasonable transactional costs (time of finding them, travel cost, transactional fees etc) is never for certain. That certain is what creates something called risk that makes people hesitate and “alter their shots.” Because certain Jordan inserts for example the 1998 Starquest Gold Jordan card come to market so infrequently that pretty much the market price is whatever the market participants decide it is throwing out even the illusion of “it was last sold for this much” or it was sold on “T** P***** and do you have a list on that site” super unreasonable, player not condition centric like some Y****** or One P**** slop, sweatshop mass production, loss leader race to the bottom, non-artistic curated premium valuation BS.
On this note, any dealer that use that kind of valuation methodology doesn’t have my trust and any platform that is player centric that caters to a population that is not what the hobby is all about with the kind of dispensable income to match is likely not a good potential buyer market anyway. In capitalism, people’s worth should only be viewed through the lens of money and their future money or economic impact as an indicator meritocracy or having future consumer offsprings even if they likely can’t educate them properly. Any other BS about philanthropy is about altruism only is probably just communistic propaganda. People like to do whatever they want to do. As long as it’s within the rules of moral and legal society, that’s probably how economic maximization should be in a comparative and absolute advantageous arena where people’s passion dictate their efforts. Anything in contrast to that will just invite the fate of America’s number one nemesis where people opening revolt by staying silent and do nothing but laying flat and say yes to no consumerism, low effortism, no offsprings and virally effective in affecting others in the same way. The rules I have regarding strategic collectible cards emergency reserve as a FU currency are of the following. Three to five years out is the best. Assuming you have never utilized a FU emergency fund before, your typical reaction when losing everything is first tap into your savings while trying to find a job to get some cash flow. If that’s not working well, you will then resort to other things like taking out your retirement funds or borrowing. Then after you internally struggle within yourself, you will first accept a lower standard of living and give up on many things you are use to so you can be closer to a matching cash flow situation then you will probably try to sell your FU emergency reserve.
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How to create a strategic collectible cards emergency reserve as a FU currency.
This whole process from trying to be okay to selling your FU emergency reserve is probably a one and half year to three year ordeal. When you first set up the FU reserve you are probably in a good place in your life with ample disposable income. Hence my recommendation is your outlook horizon when creating this reserve should be about three to five year timeline. This means you should active figure out what will be good to sell when you need to sell that reserve. That’s get one thing clear. FU strategic reserve is just a reserve not a reservoir. It won’t be an endless fountain of wealth. It’s a resource to get through a black swan event. If you are depending on this as a long-term strategy, you probably have bigger problems you need to work out with your therapist. This reserve should ideally be significant enough to worth the effort of selling and should be liquid enough to sell quickly preferably within three days. This means the expensive stuff with only a few buyers is out of the question. Right now the faster moving stuff are the cards worth a few hundred to a less than two thousand. Sealed products worth keeping are usually more than this and when you are in this situation you are pretty much near homeless and constantly in the move. It is not recommended to keep sealed for this reserve. The smaller move is to keep single cards in those less than 1K card top loader boxes, I recommend a maximum of two boxes that can fit into a four wheeled luggage that you can take anywhere with you. You will only survive this if you are nimble and fast. Each day is another day you are borrowed time when you are experiencing this event without improving your cash flow. Logistics is everything and money moves all mundanely possible things including logistics. The cards that move the best are vintage Pokemon, holo charizards and holo Pikachus. NBA cards especially the SSPs move well provided they are of GOATesque players.
Don’t try to speculate on new rookie cards for this reserve, it frequently won’t work out for the average person. MLB and NFL might be okay if we are talking superstar SSP RPAs but in general basketball is much more popular on the card side in the US as it is also very international. Americans don’t like soccer and don’t lesson to these make believe people who don’t understand why Americans don’t like soccer. It’s the same reason why America is on the customary system not metric and not even on the Imperial system. Soccer is too slow paced foreign sport with mostly poor Southern hemisphere third world playing that doesn’t feel exclusive to Americans. Besides the van people who care about their kids getting a scholarship, you just have to understand what demographic group watch and most passionate about playing soccer to understand why it won’t be popular for years in the US. If you are actively escorting your unwelcome house guess out of your house, would you care about the sports they like to watch and play? Put it simply, understand who has the money and power to buy your cards, tailor to that group. Take your social justice BS elsewhere when you yourself could be one of those people you are “fighting” for soon if you don’t do something about your “financial insecurities.” I recommend a $50,000 FU cards reserve with current market value that are likely appreciable assets. You will likely only get 20-30% of whatever value when you sell in mass quickly when you really need the money. If you are into compliance or SOPs, review and make adjustments to your strategic reserve once a year or two. Wait, what am I talking about, we are talking about cards people or possibly habitual borderline gamblers. Never mind. Don’t hate the player nor game, hate yourself later that you put yourself in this position of vulnerability. Be thankful you even had this reserve in the first place. The most important thing when you are in this situation is figure out how to get out with minimal liability and long-term financial stability going forward. Feeling sorry for yourself is the last thing you need in this crucial time.