General Forum

It's been fun to walk down memory lane as I have been cataloging my collection from the junk era but frankly, it's proving to be a bit of a burden!  I hope I'm not the only one but I'm finding it very difficult to simply toss these "worthless" cards in the garbage (which, let's face it, that's where most of them belong) because I spent so many years telling myself they'd be worth something someday.

Well, that someday is here and now it's clear the majority of my cards aren't worth the cardstock they're printed upon.

So - hoping you've been down this road already, how did you decide which were worth keeping, and which needed to be trashed (or perhaps donated)?

Unless they're damaged or in less than nice condition, I can't bring myself to throw cards away (or even recycle).  They just go in a box that gets sold / traded / donated somewhere.  It's equivalent to blasphemy to discard good cards, no matter how worthless. 

Keep. Or find a way to move. There are some on here more than happy to take some/all off your hands

I have trouble getting rid of ANYTHING let alone my treasured cards from my youth.   Just before I found out about TCDB I purchased several dozen 1988 Topps Jumbo packs that I quickly opened.  Then when I had to log close to 5000 1988 Topps I seriously questioned my thought process.   

For a good portion of my junk era cards that hold very little value both monetarily and in sentiment I flipped through them quickly looking for any variations of worth and any/all HOF players.  Pulled them out and logged them only.  My thought when deciding to do this was simply "can I purchase the entire factory (or collated) set on EBAY for $25 or less.  If the answer was yes, I kept very little and shopped for those inexpensive sets that can be logged quickly and easily.  Not ideal for all but it did work for me.  

Then I either sold the excess at a garage sale for very little, donated them to a local card shop or gave them away for Halloween.   A lot of kids love this as an alternative to getting candy.  This helped me trim down my collection somewhat and made my mountain of cards to log look less daunting.   Hope this helps!

What do you mean by "garbage"?  If you mean commons from the junk era, there are plenty of us who still collect them and have been looking to finish off sets from those eras.  What you no longer value might be something someone here is looking for to finish off their set.

List them to your for sale list and I'm sure you'll find people willing to trade what you actually want in exchange for some of them.

I can't/won't throw away any card that isn't severely damaged. Donating to the boys and girls clubs, goodwill, Etc is always a good option.

I definitely would be happy to buy/trade for junk wax I need to finish up sets.

I would say log them here. I thouight it would be difficult to move mine, but I have found means to move a few thousand of them. (And I'm still looking for a few stragglers here and there myself.)

A collector does not look at the cards like that. We collect cards because we like to and it's fun and we enjoy it.

An investor only sees the price tag of what they have. They placed a bet assuming they could cash out high someday for what they have.  But there was no guarantee that the prices would go up. 

A hobby rarely turns into a business. You can sell them for $1 a card on the interweb. People do buy them, but it's going to be a long game to sell them. Hitting many websites to sell them would increase your sales. I just found an ebay like, website where I've been buying cards. It's ebluejay.com 

If you want to get rid of the cards you call worthless, I'll gladly take them and pay for the shipping. I collect and will give them a good home. 

The past couple of years I’ve unloaded quite a number of big long boxes as charitable donations to various pickup organizations.