Over the last six months or so, sports cards have been my side hustle. Back in September, I bought someone’s sports cards collection (primarily baseball). I diligently listed and sold the collection piecemeal so that I wasn’t overwhelmed with shipping things out. Sometime in November, I had recouped the money that I used to buy the cards. After that I started making some money off the investment. Getting real profit from the enterprise was pretty sweet and it gave me energy to look for the next thing. Here are the lessons I learned and ultimately why I have decided to discontinue my sports car side hustle.
What People Want (and What’s Easy to Sell)
The collection I purchased consisted of three categories of cards: individual cards, unopened packs/boxes of cards, and complete sets of cards. All of the “sealed wax” (the unopened stuff) was from the late -80s. The complete sets were primarily late -80s/early -90s but there were a couple from the mid -80s. In the late 80s and early 90s, the sports cards companies printed massive volumes of cards. Because of that, the cards from this era have little value. I figured that most of the money from this collection would come from the valuable single cards. I needed to get them graded to get the highest price for them. Since I didn’t want to put more money into the venture before making anything, I put the single cards on the backburner and focused on selling off some of the sealed stuff first.
It turned out that I had some luck on my side. I had 20 unopened boxes for a set that contained Ken Griffey Jr’s rookie card. Another 20 were from a set that had Randy Johnson’s. Even though the set at large has little value, players like Griffey Jr and Randy Johnson are still very popular among collectors. The unopened boxes were really easy to sell. People like the thrill of the chase more than anything. As of now, all those cards have been sold, and I’ve made some good profit. So where does the card side hustle go from here?
The Next Step and Why I’m Not Doing it
There are two options for me if I want to stay in the card business. The first is to use my profits to go out and buy another collection. This is difficult, because the bigger collections sell for thousands of dollars. I definitely didn’t make that much from the sale of this one. And most collections are made up of thousands of (mostly worthless) individual cards. There’s a lot of work that goes into estimating how much each will sell for in its current condition. Searching through thousands of cards to sell them individually doesn’t particularly interest me.
The other path is to buy more unopened boxes of cards, particularly modern cards. Initially, this appealed to me. I joined some Facebook groups and started to learn which products are popular/are easiest to resell. There are two ways to make money here. The first is to buy unopened boxes and wait. You need to hope that the top rookies in that year turn out to be great players so that the price that people are willing to pay for the unopened box goes up. That’s typically a 2-3 year process. It’s speculation at its finest, and it takes a whole lot of luck to make money.
The second way to make money is definitely sleazier. Basically, you stake out Walmart or Target and buy every box of sports cards the second they restock the shelves. Then you jack the price up to double what you paid and sell it online. You’ll end up selling to the people that tried to buy it in the store, but couldn’t because you were there to clear the shelves as soon as they stocked it. Stores are trying to curtail this practice by setting a limit on how much you can buy per day. But on the sports cards Facebook pages, almost every sales post is made by folks who do this. The pictures that accompany these posts are crazy. The seller will have an entire basement full of unopened boxes of sports cards.
Basically, the two options are to speculate, or to rip people off.
What I’m Doing Instead
The final nail in the coffin came when I thought hard about what my sports card side hustle actually is. I’m not creating anything or solving anyone’s problems. At best, buying a collection and reselling it helps other collectors obtain individual cards that are more difficult to find. With the unopened boxes, I’d either be selling to other speculators or to people that are gambling in the hope that they get a card that justifies the higher price they’re paying for the box. In either case, it feels more like being a middleman instead of someone creating value.
If I’m going to be spending my limited free time doing something, I want it to be helpful. I want to be creating something. This blog, for example, is a creative outlet for me. I enjoy writing and I enjoy learning about personal finance. Any future side hustle I do has to meet this criteria. My side hustle goals have not changed and I’m still working towards it. With the sports card side hustle, I’ve learned about what I don’t want to do. And better yet, I didn’t lose a ton of money in the process.