The sad reality is that you can spend a lifetime collecting something, the but likelihood that any of your potential heirs is also interested in it, is pretty close to zero. That's true of multi-million dollar vintage computers, or your childhood stamp collection that's mostly worthless. Paul's mistake was not properly establishing a foundation & endowment to maintain this musuem, which almost certainly leaks lots of money.
I personally have a decent art collection that I've amassed over the past couple decades. I have a few pieces earmarked in my will to specific friends & family that have really liked certain pieces (they don't know), but the reality is that my estate executor is going to sell the vast majority of it, and at 50¢ on the dollar of what I paid.
You're not going to get 50 cents if I know anything about it.
Maybe if you started selling today you could get that, an estate auction will get a few pennies.
A few of my pieces are quite desirable and valuable, most of them not. I looked at the numbers, and all together 40-50% of what I paid is the ballpark of today's value, not including any consignment fees.
I've said this before, and for you I'm assuming there's no rush, but the best person to sell the "valuable" part of the collection is you.
Now granted, most collections are not art - so I'm assuming you gave fewer distinct pieces than say stamps.
My dad had a serious stamp collection. Had he died with it complete, we would have sold it for a few $ to a dealer. The cost of (him or us) going through it to find "the good stuff would be too high.
Take your art. Unless you've cataloged it, had it appraised, and keep that updated every few years, your heirs will likely just sell it as a job-lot to a dealer. Given his costs, and risks, he'll pick a small number (like $50 per). Your Rembrant is his to find.
What my dad did was sell off the expensive stuff himself before he died (and told us). He knew what he had, and where to find it. (He discovered that selling is different to buying, but that's another thread). At least we knew that what was left was basically worthless and we could donate it with a clear conscience.
You got me curious...
When collecting there's a selling price and a buying price. The difference can be -substantial-.
For example, stamps have a catalog. Literally a giant book, with all the stamps and variations, and the current value. (Ahem, buying value). Think if it as a giant "vendor neutral" price guide. [1]
Now obviously when you come to sell you mostly sell to a dealer. So you expect him to take some margin. He has to make a living. But the margin they expect will make your eyes water. (50% to 90% is common). Do test $100 stamp you have is say $10.
But eBay- sell direct. Sure you get more. But still a lot less than book value (partly because scams etc makes eBay risky for good stuff.) And it's it's lot of extra work. Useful for one or two pieces, less useful for 50. (And, of course, scams happen in both directions.)
That's if you know what you have. Selling someone else's collection on eBay when you don't know what you have is equally tricky.
In short, collections are expensive to acquire and hard to get rid of. The value in collecting is the joy of acquiring and having. Collections are (with rare exceptions) not a financial investment.
[1] my insight into stamp collecting died 20 years ago, so I'm guessing this catalog is online now.
I'm a lifelong collector of a variety of (very) niche things, and have at times sold or tried to sell items from my collections, or whole collections at once. You're right about everything, I would only add that each category of thing is its own world in terms of liquidity and how certain you can be of obtaining a guide price. It also pays off to learn about the collector cultures and communities surrounding each type of thing, so you know what obscure periodical or special interest show, etc. to target when you are trying to sell. Never be in a rush, and the other thing that can make a difference is developing good product photography/videography skills.
Sometimes the best thing you can do with a collection is bequeath it to someone in the hobby who's much younger.
Weeel.. maybe. The joy in collecting is the collecting. Getting it all at once kinda robs the fun..
But bequething them one or two significant pieces can get them started, and perhaps carries more meaning...
Patient buyers are another characteristic of long tail markets on eBay.
The pool of stamp collectors etc. is small relative to say guitar players; there’s not an endless September; and buying from dealers is the “socially acceptable” way of starting.
So potential buyers on eBay tend to be experienced bargain shoppers when it comes to ordinary collectability. They will happily wait for the bragging rights price or at least the no way to lose money price.
Collecting is a hobby. Picking is a business.
[I’m not the person who said it.]
Sellers don’t control when a sale will happen in the ways buyers do. Once you decide to buy you can — assuming the item is already for sale.
That already for sale part is the difference. Sales have lead times. Even at fire sale prices the decision to sell precedes someone buying. It takes time for the right person to find your item.
Pricing and advertising and marketing can help. But they don’t force the timing of a sale.
I appreciate the advice. My collection is catalogued with what I paid and current-ish fair market values. The future executor will know which handful ones are worth consigning individually and at what galleries, and the rest will likely be bulk sold.
That's the way to do it! Mind you paintings are bigger than stamps so it feels like you're cheating.... :)
I have bought a lot of stuff at estate auctions. Yeah, a generic estate sale will not generate a lot of money, but if you have serious art (i.e., it would sell to more than a local audience), it can bring in quite a bit. I saw an Alan Bean (the astronaut) painting at one; ended up going for over $30k. And the estate gets all of that; the auction house charges a premium (in this case, 25%) paid by the buyer, but the official auction price is what the seller gets.
The liquidation value of the average middle-class house is $10k - according to my divorce attorney.
$10k sounds high to me if we're talking about home electronics, furniture, etc?
Do people have a lot of expensive jewelry that's included, or does it include vehicles?
If we're talking the contents, you can get to $10k pretty easily, think appliances (a hundred or so each), laptops, stereo, etc.
If you held a garage sale today and let people go throughout your entire house, you could probably net $10k.
The ones I’m talking about are definitely not middle class.
Few is if they're lucky. More like 1.
My Dad collected antique cap guns. By the "collector's bible" its "worth" $40 - $50 grand. He got zero offers for it when it became clear he needed to liquidate some of his "stuff" to pay for health care. So yeah, I don't think my collection of "classic" computers will return anything to my heirs sadly.
Well, I see classic 1970s-80s computers that I'm interested in selling for hundreds or even thousands of dollars on eBay etc.
Gen-Xers who grew up with them are getting nostalgic, and many of them have a lot of disposable income and plenty of space to house them.
But it is a lot of work to get that kind of money for each individual machine. And I suspect it will be a passing fad. In some decades when the Gen-Xers start to log out, the younger generations will not sustain the same kind of market.
I wonder if anyone is buying them at those prices though.
I collected a few machines when they were either being given away at work or nearly given away on eBay.
Computer prices are a bathtub curve for interesting computers. Very expensive at the start, then they're worthless garbage for 10-40 years, then prices start to rise. If it's not interesting, then they just stay worthless.
Examples:
- Supercomputer parts
- SGI, HP 9000, Sun SPARC machines and parts
- More esoteric UNIX workstations
- PDPs
- VAXen (how many complete cabinet-style VAXen still exist?)
- Apples
- Terminals (since almost all of these were tossed, these are surprisingly expensive even in bad condition)
And probably need to be in pretty mint condition and find the right buyers. Nothing I have is mint and I wouldn't even try to sell it. The minicomputer boards are from a once major minicomputer maker but very few people have probably even heard of them today.
Like the other poster wrote, it is time dependent.
The stuff that went into dumpsters in the 1990s can sell for thousands today on eBay. But in 30 years, they might be dumpster bound again.
I just double checked to make sure, and an Atari Falcon early 1990s 68030 CPU computer sells for around $3000 today.
The problem is it’s only valuable to those who hold value to it because they grew up with it. Once those collectors get old and start dying off, the bottom falls out of the market because subsequent generations don’t have the same nostalgia. and thus those once valuable collectibles are then basically worthless.
I have first hand experience of this happening too. My dad collected a specific type of model railway. His collection used to be worth thousands but by the time I inherited it all the other collectors were also dead and neither myself nor my brother wanted to maintain the collection. So we sold it for practically nothing.
Dad would be turning in his grave if he knew but frankly, he was the only person who had sentimental value to that collection and we needed the space. It wasn’t even about the money for us, it was literally just multiple boxes of stuff we knew we wouldn’t ever use and didn’t want to keep indefinitely just to honour the memory of dad (we have far better ways to honour his memory).
This isn’t meant to sound insensitive because I loved my dad and still miss him a lot.
I have a large collection of retro gaming consoles and 8 and 16 bit computers. Plus hundreds of games on physical media. I love my collection just like my dad loved his trains. But I know my family will sell it for a pittance the moment I pass away. And I’m fine with that. I own it because it brings me pleasure. I didn’t buy it thinking my family should honour my legacy by hoarding it too.
I enjoyed stamp collecting as a kid. I inherited a stamp album from a distant relative who I think was a clipper ship captain or something along those lines. Was probably worth some money once upon a time. I should look at it one of these days. I'm sure it (and my own collection) are worth nothing today.
This is sad because it's true. Thank you for writing this.
Yeah, I'm really nostalgic for 90s era computer & gaming stuff — turns out, that stuff is pretty expensive right now cause all of us that grew up with it have the disposable income to re-buy it. 30-40 years from now when we're all dying & downsizing? I'm sure that market will crater.
We've seen this play out before. This couple in Wisconsin stocked up on antique phones when the demand was hot in the 1980s, now they are in their 80s and they can't get rid of them:
https://madison.com/news/local/phoneco-wisconsin-telephones-...
They should advertise up here in Canada. Functional rotary phones are selling like hotcakes for $50-80 a pop. Especially original non-standard (not-black) colours.
The issue with estate sales is that they are usually estate disposals. People inheriting their parents’ stuff are usually themselves grown adults with their own busy lives, and the average estate consists of immense amounts of clutter that the inheritor has approximately zero interest in. They’re grieving, they’re seeking closure. Not looking to spend years sifting through hundreds of thousands of items of household bric-à-brac looking to extract value. They want your house cleared so they can sell it and hopefully pay off a bit of their own mortgage.
I’m sure if somebody came along with a serious offer for the collection with the goal of exhibiting it somewhere else it would be accepted.
Well, yes. But that assumes someone with the capital and interest in kicking off a probably money-losing museum. After all, another computer museum with some significant holdings also went out of business 20-30 years ago. Silicon Valley is not unique but computers and other industrial artifacts are just not what most people have in mind when they're looking for a museum to go to.
This is all sadly too true, which is why I think we should do our best to declutter as we age. Ideally when our time comes, we should only have things of immediate use and value to us left, and pretty much none of "might be good to have one day".
I've seen instances where people couldn't get rid of things due to grief and decided to keep it all tucked away for several decades, leaving the decluttering to the following generation(s). Better then to be a bit proactive.
That's not the issue, he set up the parts of his empire he cared about so they'd live on (Allen Institute for example) and instructed his sister to sell the rest. She could have gone against his instructions, but the point is he clearly he didn't care whether the Cinerama or the Living Computer Museum continued on. That's on him, not his heirs.
The fact that no other Seattle-adjacent computer billionaires like Gates, Bezos, Simonyi, Ballmer has offered to continue it just shows the generally low quality of people that have gotten rich from tech.
Or the fact that they don't see maintaining a home for a bunch of old computers for people to look at is a priority given other museums and world needs.
It's not like there's a shortage of money for art museums or natural history museums, but we do seem to be closing museums (this one and previously the Boston one) detailing the history of one of the biggest innovations in human history.
When you say "world needs" you mean sports teams and personal space travel? It's safe to say all of them have plenty of money to save this small museum and still fund their hobbies and causes.
Personal collections are for enjoyment, not investment.
I liquidated some of my fathers things for effectively nothing. That he spent decades acquiring.
That can be a good outcome if things go to someone who values them as much as the original owner.
My Dad had a collectable car. We sold it for a fair price to an enthusiast who drives it, looks after it and keeps in in a public museum when it's not being driven. That was a good outcome. Better than someone in the family hoarding it and letting it deteriorate.
The money was immaterial, main reason for asking a fair price was to discourage someone who didn't value the car from flipping it for a tidy profit. We were also lucky, in that a member of Dad's car club was prepared to vet buyers for us.
Disbanding a closed computer museum isn't a bad thing if the items go to others who will value and display them.
A collectable car is one thing. A bevy of collectable figurines, another thing all together.
Is there any value to a museum for that art?
This is one of the reasons why I avoid "collecting" anything. (Another is space, maintenance, etc.)
There's just not much point, unless you absolutely love something. But many people collect with the end-game of making a profit, which is a mistake.
In this case he didn’t have heirs and seems to have asked in his will to auction it off instead of endowing it.
Reminds me of the guy (Ken Fritz) who built a $1M listening room that his kids sold for (essentially) parts after he died.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/interactive/2024/ken-fr...
I don't blame them at all. It was his passion, not theirs.
There was a private tank collection in Portola Valley. There was a way to arrange tours but it didn't have anything like regular hours. It was just a guy with lots of money spending it on buying and restoring tanks. Most of them could run under their own power. Stuff like a German Tiger parked facing an American Sherman and a Russian T34. 2 huge garage fulls of these things. And visitors were allowed to climb onto and into all the tanks. It's how I learned that British tanks are righthand drive.
Anyway, guy died, his heirs preferred money to tanks, and they all got sold off. At best they are on display somewhere on the east coast behind velvet rope where no one will touch or drive them again.