Auctions ,and Finding Silver, Gold And Gems And How To Sell Them 43732l

Auctions, and Finding Silver, Gold and Gems and how to Sell Them

Mr. Joel Goodwin

Copyright © 2013 by Mr. Joel Goodwin.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012923248 ISBN: Hardcover 978-1-4797-6416-7 Softcover 978-1-4797-6415-0 Ebook 978-1-4797-6417-4

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Contents

Foreword

Chapter 1 A brief history

Chapter 2 Start up money for free

Chapter 3 The different venues

Chapter 4 What to buy, where and when

Chapter 5 Frauds, Fakes and repos

Prologue

I must dedicate this to my wife for putting up with me and my two children, Chris and Nicole who now think Dad might not be crazy after all. And to my Mom and Dad and my Grandfather who taught me to take care of the things one accumulates in life.

Foreword

I am lucky to be doing what I do now although near tragedy is what got me here. I worked in other fields for more than thirty years almost all of which was heavy industry. That is where I nearly ended my life. After being injured severely I stuck with it another eight years un till I could no longer do the work. Collecting had been a serious hobby of mine since I was a teenager and it did not require me to do physical work. I had run businesses on the side of my regular job since the 80s out of my home. All of a sudden I was faced with lots of time on my hands but the prospect of living on a fixed income. What to do? There were parts of my collections that I would never sell but others meant less to me. All those years collecting I had been very concerned about prices, whether buying at auction or from an individual and had always stuck to a limit that was meant to provide me an excellent profit margin should the time arise to sell some items. As I had found out in my business there were those who would pay full or near full book prices for pieces in excellent condition. It was not long before I was selling in severel venues from trade papers to local papers to the inter net. I have realized some excellent prices, some might say quite shameful even. All of a sudden here I am enjoying selling almost as much as collecting. But what really got me going was the finding of pieces to collect or to sell. It was much as one might imagine finding treasure is like. Come and me and have fun while you make money!

J.P. Goodwin

Chapter 1

A brief history

I guess I was born to be a collector although I did not know it untill my teenage years. My mothers father came to town during the great depression. When he got here he was looking for land to buy. There was another who also was looking for land and the two were both shown fairly large parcels for town. My grandfather bought overgrown farm land overlooking the town and the other guy bought the most undesirable parcel in town with a tannery next to it and a dump across the road. This was one of my first lessons in buying and selling. Grandad got his good deal as noone else was buying but the other guy soon to be our town banker ended up making millions on his terrible property. Grandad said that looks can sometimes be decieving and you have to weigh all the options when making a perchase. He lacked the future vision of the banker but he alwasys seemed happy with it. Our whole family ended up building on the property over the years and there is still only family today 80 years later. Even though all the family seemed to have good jobs we all insisted on doing everthing ourselves. This included building our homes all of which are still beautiful. My father and my Grandad both taught me carpentry, the masons trade and electrical and plumbing. As a preteen I would go out on constuction jobs with my father which he took on outside his regular work. I learned a lot by the doing and uppermost was quality of the work. This experience taught me the value of hard work and that sweat equity was a way to build value on your own home. In my teen years I was conflicted with deciding on girls or just working and making money. I soon learned that with girls you are going to need money. Since we had a lot of fruit trees with more fruit than we could use I was given the oppurtunity of picking and selling the excess as noone else seemed to want to do it. In good years I would sell hundreds of quarts of cherries and damsons and bushels of peaches. Grandad used to show me his old coins that he had kept

despite the depression and soon I was looking through the change I was paid with and thus my collection was begun. Grandad would even take me down to the bank, yes the same guys bank who bought the bad land and he took a liking to me and would let me go into the vault, and show me some of the coins he had collected. He told me how at quiting time he would go thru the bank drawers looking for collectable coins. He said a collector has to take advantage of every chance he gets to futher his collection. He also stressed the fact that one should when buying buy the very best quality he can afford. Everything I had learned had stressed quality and pride in workmanship. This would serve me well in life in not just collecting but everthing I did. When I married my highschool sweatheart and got a good job it wasnt very long before I wanted a house of my own. In a few short years we had saved enough to get started and I bough land from my father and mother. I had designed a house of some 2400 square feet and four bedrooms. I had some help in getting started and along the way with even my wife carring things I didnt think she should be carring. I had the house under roof before I ever went to the bank and got any money from a home loan. Twenty years was the length and we ended up paying that off early. With a home and a family and more local contracters than you could shake a stick at doing construction work outside my job was not very feasible so I took a different route. I feel back on quality work and my salesmanship and opened a gunsmithing and gun sales shop. Demand was fairly brisk and it was not long before I took my sales on the road to gun shows. I sold more than I ever imagined I could and still I was looking for more ways to branch out. I negotiated a deal with the manager of a sporting club run by a five star hotel to buy and sell their once fired shotshell hulls to reloaders. I had some idea that this would be a good deal but I did not think I would be shipping them to Europe or asia which I did. After 12 years of running the buisness I decided to go back to college while retaining my position for a major corporation and that left no time for the buisness or anything else for that matter. All through the eighties and the ninetys I continue to collect my coins and even branched out a bit into other areas. I was a regular at all the local auctions and I paid attention to what was going on around me and learned who was my competion and some ways to aviod having them cost me more money than I was willing to pay. From the mid eighties on I had been in the quality control department at my employer and had tested and and been responsible for visual inspection of product before it went to the customer. This in turn made me take a much closer look at anything I bought or bid on at an auction. There is nothing

worse than paying at or near top dollar for aa particular piece only to find out later that it has been repaired or the fit and finish is not what you thought it to be. If you have never been to an auction one thing you will find is a printed message to you that all items are sold as is where is and that is your warning to look closely. One of the things I could never understand was those people who would bid on something having never left their seats to inspect the piece and then often paying more than full retail price for something. But you will find all kinds of people at auctions. When auctions were not enough to satisfy my collecting I started to go to every yard sale and estate sale I could find within a resonable distance. This was the roaring ninetys with the take off of the net and money flowing freely and I even began to travel some distance to auctions if the overall auction seemed to be of high quiality. This was one hell of a learning experience with the general lack of knowledge of yard sellers to the new buyers I had to compete with on out of town auctions. I bought some great items when the price was right and learned to set a limit on any item I would be willing to pay as my stopping point at auctions. I will be the first to it that I have paid the going rate for highly desireable pieces for my coin collection and those pieces my wife just has to have but on the whole if I can not buy it and make money on it if I decide to sell it later I do not buy it. If you are wondering when I decided to write this book it was two years before the current trend on tv to highlight this part of our America. I was working on two other books and then shopping around for an agent and a publisher for a year or more. The process could be a book in and of itself. As I edit my own work I can now add the new popularity of what has for me been almost a lifetime undertaking. For me it is the thrill of the hunt and the buying at a great price or deciding to sell and making far more than I paid in the beginning. If I ever lose that feeling I would probably stop collecting but so far that has not happened. I did recently decide to narrow my eclectic buying and concentrate on the few coins I do not have and my art collection which I derive a gret deal of pleasure from. When you have only paths to walk through in a major portion of your house and you have exterior building full also it might just be time to thin the herd. I wiil try to walk you thru the process of either collecting or buying or selling for a profit in a manner that will help you from making too many mistakes. I made my share early on and with money being harder to come by you do not want to

start off with a lot of costly mistakes. One of the first things I did back in the eighties was to find as many books as I could on collectables and then actually read them. I bought a lot of them from thrift stores and even auctions and yard sales. Do not worry about them being out of date as you are not going to use them as price guides as most have never been any good in that respect any way. Prices have a way of being regional for a lot of collectables if you sell them in your region. What you sell here for a hundred dollars here might not realize sixty dollars half way across the country. In my last chapter I will cover how to determine a price that on the net will make you money at the same time it increases the chance the piece will sell quickly. I am not to concerned with the volume sales for me as I am in no hurry but volume sales is a n excellent way to keep the money flowing in. Besides the fact that the hunt itself can be so rewarding the money realized can also be quite nice. When you develope the skills or are just lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time you can aquire something that can return a good investment for your dollars later on. Whether you plan to leave it to your family or sell it now for a profit either way can increase your net worth. I will relate to you some of my finds and what they were worth or what they sold for just a little later but first I must teach you to keep the records that you will need regardless of which option you decide to use. If you are going to collect for your familys future they should have records showing exactly what you paid for each piece along with a good description. You have not done your job unless you provide them this information even after you are gone. I set up a record book with each piece listed along with a very good description and a number along with where I bought it and how much I paid along with what I guess it is worth. Even if you are not going to keep it but sell it you will need this information. You might think that you can all the particulars but it gets harder when you have hundreds of pieces. I have with much practice been able to most of the particulars of many of my pieces but I still know I need the records because my family will need them and my memory may not be as good ten years from now. What lead me to be so particular in my record keeping happened years ago in my coin collecting. A clerk at my bank new I collected coins and one day when I came in she said I have something you might want. I didnot figure it was an offer for a date and it was not. She said a girl was coming in with old coins left to her by her grandfather. She had told the girl they were worth more money but she

said nothing and cashed in two rolls of Mercury dimes and one roll of Walking liberty dollars. The clerk asked if I wanted them for face value and you can imagine my excitment. I made a lot of extra trips to the bank and picked up a lot of valuable cions and even started to find some at local buisnesses. Sometimes they would sell them to me and sometimes not. The last I found was morgan dollars at the filling station I frequented. She had come in and paid for her gas with dollar coins. The clerk showed me one which just happened to be a 1904 San Francico in high grade, she had gotten a dollars worth of gas for this cion when it was worth hundreds of dollars. This was a lesson that I did not have to learn the hard way, someone else did which is the best way to learn things. My rcord keeping may seem excessive but what I strive for is a record that anyone can read and understand the importance of it. At auctions I take my record book with me and enter things as I aquire them. For the other types of sales I will record everthing as soon as I return home from going to them while the memory is still fresh. Even with the records I have often lectured my wife and my children, Chris and Nicole on the record book and how to use it. I make sure to emphisize the importance of it as well as some tips as to where and to whom should the items be consigned to should the need arise. For you see if you have exceptional pieces you would probanly want them to reach a lot more buyers as you might find locally. Now as to some of the things I have found and as to there worth. You may be very surprised to find out that I live in a little town of less than 5000 people and the total in the surrounding area is less than 25,000 people. I have found many pieces that are both perfect and indeed on the rare side. The thing is collectors can be anywhere and familys all across America can and do down family treasures. Years later someone in the family has forgotten the signifigance of said pieces and ends up seeling them for whatever reason. My first big find was at a local thrift store and when I say it, it emediatly attracted my attention as being out of place. It was a very wide painting that showed obvious quality and it was signed with a complete signature. The frame was broken and pehaps that is why it was given to a thrift store. The painting itself was perfect and as it turned out it was one of a four part series by the self taught New Jersey artist Robert Sarsony. I paid a whopping one dollar and sixty five cents for it and I was glad to do it. As aregional piece if sold in New Jersey it could bring several thousand and if some collector has one or more of the other part of the same series the price could be much higher. This is one of those

I still have and will probably be with me for a long time to come. At a local auction in the heat of July a local doctors son who had ed away estate was up for auction. The first thing I noticed was that many of the regular buyers were not there. The auction was loaded with a lot of fine pieces but the crowd was not willing to pay very much for them. I bought some nice bronzes for really low prices and some art pottery but what I was waiting on were the tables of paintings and prints that looked like they were going to be near the end. This was one time that I did not ask for the pieces to be put up early but just let them go to the end of the auction. When they came up most of the bidders had left and what was left were the people who just go and never bid. To my delight when they came up they were sold as table lots as the auctioneer was in a hurry to finish up. The first table came up and there was silence so I bid a dollar and low and behold I got the first table. The same thing happened on the next two tables and I was estatic. These were not thousand dollar pieces but they were nice and there were a lot of old religious prints among them. Just the frames alone were worth many many times what I had spent at the whole auction. A lady standing next to me said it best when she said you got some really nice stuff for not a lot of money, then she said I would not have known what to do with them all. Sometimes it pays to be the last bidder standing even in the hot July late evening heat.

At a yard sale in the summer of 2010 I came upon two tables of silver serving pieces. One table had some ornate plated pieeces priced at about market. The other table had seven srving pieces of sterling silver and the total price I paid for everthing was seveenteen dollars. This was at a time when silver was climbing in price. In 2011 I sold a lot of sterling that I had been buying for years and what I had just over a thousand dollars in I sold for thirty nine hundred dollars. That is good profit in anyones book. Just a few months after selling some of my silver I came across two 14k gold wedding bands, and not the thin ones but a large mans and a ladys ring. I bought them both for a mere twenty five dollars. This same summer I found a man selling a lot of sterling earrings and rings. The earrings were Navajo made with some being signed pieces. I paid two dollars each buying all the earrings and four dollars each for six rings. I have sold all but a few of the earings at twenty dollars each with twenty five for the artist signed ones and I still have the rings which I wear a couple of and they are easily worth twohundred dollrs.

My very first internet sell was a very nice set of flatware, it was a beautiful pattern but it was just plated. I paid fifteen dollars for the set at an auction and sold it for three hundred and fifty five dollars. I bought twenty sets of nice and some rare patterns thru the worst of the recession and plan on holding them. I paid very little for them and as all the sterling sets are being melted people will have to pay my prices or buy the ugly cheaply made Chinese stuff. My first ever auction that was stopped part way through was indoors and occured in February of 2009. There was a good crowd but no one was willing to spend anything. I bought cigar boxes of Indian Artifacts at two to five dollars a piece. I was waiting for some premo bird points and clay pipes to come up in a nice display case when the auctioneer called a hault to the auction. I could literally go on and on about what I bought during the fall into the recession and the slow climb out of it. The important thing is I had the money to buy when the best buys were out there and that was no accident. It is not enough to tell you to go out and collect or go out and buy to resell for a profit without telling you how to free up the money to do so. It is not always easy to find that money but if you approach it as lifetime system as I do you will be surprised at just how much money you are wasting each week, each month, each year and on and on.

Chapter 2

Start up money for free

We often look at our own budgets and think we have nothing extra to invest with when in truth we have multiple ways to find money we didnt know we had. Much of the money we could be putting to use is as simple a s changing our personal habits and sticking with it for a lifetime. The other will be in looking at how we go about buying things that we need and use on a daily basis such as gas for our car or materials for the up keep of our property. My inspireation came from having a family to take care of in the best way that I could. Wanting to start a buisness without borrowing money is not an easy thing to do but it can be done if you are willing to change your habits and looking at other ways to get by on less. I also drew inspiration from a billionaire Japanese buisness man when he showed his shoes that had worn through the sole which he fixed with a piece of duct tape to get some more miles out of them. Yes he was a bit extreme but perhaps that is how he got to be a billionaire. It is hard enough to start a buisness now a days especially if you go into debt to do it. This will automatically increases you chances of failure. You are starting with both monetary issues to deal with and the mental stress that comes with it. Most of the collecting world would be catagorized as an expensive endevor and as a coin collector I know all to well. I found a partial solution for me in collecting and then selling some pieces to finance my costs and put toward my coin perchases and it has worked quite well paying for all my buisness costs and most of my collecting. In the back of my mind hiding among all the collecting memories I have that little idea that says what if I sold everything I collected. I would never do it because that was not part of my original plan and I always stick to my plans. The changes I have made in my life have little or no impact in the quality of life I lead but they do have a positive impact even if your plan is not to start a

collection or finance a buisness. Every one can use a little more money in the bank at the end of the month. You might have a little apprehension as to what might be in store for you but to put your mind at ease here is an example. In the last year I have had four new pairs of tennis shoes and all were brand names that anyone would think I paid a couple hundred dollars for. They were all perchased a a big name thrift store and the total cost for all four was just under eleven dollars. And with this I did not even have to use any duct tape. We all have a pair of tennis shoes that we wear so that we do not ruin the best ones but when you only pay two fifty for them it does not really matter. So much of what we do and what we buy can end up costing us far less than we ever imagined it would and I will cover this in three areas. The personal habits are high on my list as well as the home and its upkeep. Our cars are one of the largest expenses and they cost x number of dollars every time we use them. And as far as I know we all have to eat and that means any number of stores or famers markets if you have them nearby. All of these combined are costs we can manipulate to some degree and that can put a lot of extra dollars in your pocket depending on how seriously you want to reduce your costs. We go thru life often paying high rates for car and home insurance due to a low copay, the amount we have to cover before the insurance kicks in. I set mine high and the savings themselves could pay the deductable should I need to. Now on to those personal habits and how to alter them without suffering any ill effects. You have done it and you have seen many others do it, that is racing to the next traffic light only to see it turn red before you get there. What is remarkable is we are such creatures of habit that we will do it day after day knowing that only a few lucky days will we make the next light. Meanwhile we are wasting several gallons of gas or more each and every week. Take a week and time youself as to how long it takes you to get to your normal destination by racing between lights. Now take a week and time yourself driving the same route at a normal speed and see what the difference. I will guarentee you the difference will not be worth all the gas you waste. At the end of a year you have spent three to four hundred dollars extra in gas to gain a handfull of minutes. Never mind the fact that you are also saving hundreds in wear and tear on your car to boot. We also as a whole do not use the gear box on our automatics and if you live in a place of steep hills with low speed limits reducing the gear down will save on your brakes. I know people who complain about their lousy gas mileage and you look in their car or truck and see that they are carrying around a couple hundred pounds that they do not need to be. That giant heavy tool box on your truck might look good but unless you are a contracter you probably do not need it, so

save the money and carry a little tool set and an emergency road kit instead. Some of the routine maintenance on your car is not that hard. Changing your own oil is easy once you have someone show you how once or twice. Also changing your air filter is easy as well as checking your cars fluids. Just ask someone to walk you through it and discover it is easier than you thought. Knowing all this makes you aware of what is important for your car and can save you thousands in major repairs. No one else is going to check untill you come to the garage with a major repair. And if heaven forbid you have to have a garage to do some work tell them before the repair you want to see the old parts that they replaced. Even if you do not know what you are looking at by telling them this they will have to assume that you do. Saving big money on parts when you need them ask ahead of time for rebuilt parts to be used as they are generally about 60 percent of what factory parts are. Cars are for most of us our second biggest investment and we should treat them that way, My Jeep Larado is 16 and it looks and runs like a new one and I put it to bed every night in the garage and have done so since the day I bought it home. Republicans made fun of President Obama when he said that one of the ways we could reduce our gas consumption was to have our tires properly inflated. We might as well accept the fact that the oil companies will never reduce the price of gas even while they enjoy a 5 billion dollar tax break ed by republicans. The simple truth is cuuting back on how much we use and if your tires are underinflated they have more with the road and more friction is created causing us to use more gas. With the prices we pay we have to look at every possibility to reduce what we consume. I used to leave lights on when I left the room for only a few minutes. Somewhere in the back of my mind I had adopted the notion that it takes more electricity to cut that light back on than leave it on. The truth is that unless you are going to be gone for only two seconds you will save money by cutting it off. This is true no matter what kind of bulb you are using. I can only hope that by now you are using the new low e bulbs. I put them in when they became available and at first they were not lasting as long a guarenteed but they solved that problem. And yes I kept my original reciepts and demanded replacement of bulbs that did not live up to the stated expectations. With forty low e bulbs we are using a lot less electricity. Do you ever leave the hot water running wide open as you brush your teeth. As more and more communities are going to water meters you might want to think about your water usuage. Waater is the most valuable commodity in the world and will only become more important as the population grows. Try

wetting your brush, brushing your teeth and rinsing all with cold water cut off between brushing and rinsing. And now the bath or shower, you probably know that showering uses much less water especially if you have a low flow shower head. I never much liked the bath anyway and I will tell you why. When I was young we had a very clean river to swim in and we also had several ponds nearby. Just to look at the difference between the two you get the feeling that one is clean and the other is dirty. I preferr to save my water at home for drinking and it is just fine for that and I now always drink at least six glasses a day. I do not know about you but as I get older I do not feel the need to have so many new clothes that I will probably never ware. What with birthdays and fathers day and Christmas I seem to get enough new stuff to do me. To me pride is just a vice like any other vice and it holds no place in my life. Pride destroys familys and pits one person against another. I shop at thrift stores and concider it just a smart thing to do. Why pay 200 to 300 times the labor cost from some foreign sweat shop to get the latest fashion when I can buy something nice for a fraction of the cost and use the savings for the benifit of my family. I see fellow classmates of mine at some of the local thrift shops and they like me concider it the smart thing to do. I have seen many BMWs and even saw a Rolls Royce recently at my favorite store. That foolish tradition of keeping up with the Jones was after all something inveted by buisnessmen to get a few more dollars from you and me. For me I will tell them you can have that dollar you want so much when you can take it from my cold dead fingers. America would be a much better country if more of us were a little more carefull at how we spent our dollars spending them on things like education and places where they will do the most good. I smoke and it is a terrible habit and I have quit before and am trying now but it is just one of the many bad habits we have. I do not gamble not even on the lottery as I know I am more likely to stumble on a gold mine as to win the lottery. Going to Vegas would be a complete waste of my time but many people give away everything they own in the place when the ods are always hevily tilted against them. Sodas, pop, that big bottle of sugar that has done so much damage to this country is something I gave up long ago in favor of milk. But if you must have soda for heavens sake get that make your own system where you buy the machine and the flavors you want all the while saving hundreds of dollars a year. You will also save the planet with all the plastic that ends up where we do not want it.

What is so hard about changing how we do things and whether we can learn to do more things on our own is not in the doing. It is in having the confidence in ourselves that yes I can learn to do that instead of paying someone else to do it. I learned a long time ago from my granparents and my parents that I should have the attitude that I can do anything I put my mind to. So far I have not found anything that would lead me to believe any different as long as I gave it my best. It has been thirty two years in my home and I have not paid anyone to do anything and with a few exceptions on my cars I do most of own maintenance on them. I have learned to do a lot just by getting the books and doing the required reading but if that is not for you try your local home depot for home project classes or check out your community college or vocational school. When you achieve the mind set that you just hate to pay anyone for something that you yourself can do you will be on your way to a more self sufiscent life style. When it comes to our homes you will find a lot of things that you can do for yourself and save a lot of money doing it yourself. The first place we give in to the temptation to let someone else do it is in our yards. Even in a small town like mine I see maybe a hundred people hauling around mowers and doing yard work for a living. My father always told me no one else is going to take care of what you own like you would. I have even gone so far as getting one of the old time reel mowers which cut the grass more like a pair if sissors instead of chopping it. It also does not use gas and it does provide so much needed exercise. Because my wife likes flowers so much I have eleven flower beds for her favorite flowers and I would never trust anyone to maintain those. And with all the attention I have given them I have come to love them too. The are the things that bring a little beauty in our lives day after day for just a little fertilizer and water. Even though I have a garden in another location I use my yard, especially the back yard as an adhock garden of sorts. With some plantings in containers and others in unused flower beds I have greens, tomatoes, pole beans, and cucumbers all within a short distance of my kitchen. You can not get much fresher than that. With some long deep planting containers and some good potting soil you can grow enough to cut into that grocery bill for four or five months a year. The key in containers is water because the limited space means the roots will soak up the water faster. You might be surprised at how many tomatoes you can grow in a six foot long flower bed, enough during their peak to even freeze some for winter. Even herbs which are expensive can be grown in abundance in a few big pots

People seem so afraid of doing their own landscaping when it is really easier than it looks. What I suggest is to take a good camera and ride around looking a those expensive landscape jobs other people have paid for and take some really good pictures. Make sure to get some closups for your garden center and they can probably pick out the same type or very similar plants. The pictures will give you a sense of scale and allow you to layout a general outline for the areas you wish to improve on. Take your time and keep things watered after you are done and the improvements may just ad some value to your property. On the topic of property values millions of people are paying taxes on values that will probably never be realized. Many neighborhoods have them, that one owner who does not keep things up as nice as every one else. That one house will bring down the values in the neighborhood but if you never check you may be paying on a high appraisal because the appraisers did not factor that one property in. This can be hundreds of eztra dollars you are paying in taxes when you will never get the price the tax was based on. Here is a trick that will save you a couple hundred dollars a year or more that I learned by accident. I have for years had a snail problem in my north facing flower beds and they often climb up the siding above the beds. The slim they exude when dry creates a stain on the siding that is most unpleasant and difficult to read. I had tried a lot of products that did not work but knew that the pressure washer would remove it. It just so happened that day I had my spray bottle of a mixture of clorox and water that I use to clean the outside water bowls for the animals when they are in thhe yard. What the heck this was about the only thing I had not tried so I gave it a generous spraying and saw the stain dissolve almost in seconds. I then rinsed it with pure water and no more stain. What I noticed was the siding in that area looked like new. To try it out on a large area I mixed a quart of bleach with a gallon and a half in my two gallon garden sprayer and tryed it on the entire side of the house. I rinsed it off after about fifteen minutes and saw what looked to be new siding. Even though the amount of bleach is small rinsing well with a hose assures that it would not damage plants. At full pressure and set on stream I found I could reach the highest points on my house. Now the only time I have to drag out the pressure washer is to wash the undercarrige of our cars several times a year. Another place on the home where people sometimes ignore is the gutters and this can end up costing you thousands of dollars. You may want to pay someone to clean out the gutters the first time but be sure to have gutter guards installed to keep out debris that can stop up your gutters and ruin the roof and even come in

on your inside walls. As usual I rigged a long pole with an attachment point to hold the hose and I can simple walk along and push the debris toward the downspout. This cleaning is for the same reason you use heat tape on roofs in cold climates to keep water from melt from getting under your shingles. Caulking on the exterior of your house where hot air can escape and cold air can to can save you big bucks year round. My house is so well sealed that you would not believe how little gas or ac I use in a year. With global warming we may have more to fear from high cooling costs as this occures during peak times for the utilities and they charge a higher rate. Every two years or so I caulk around all areas of inflow or outflow of air from my home. This includes the seal plate or where the masonary meets the wood framing. Also all windows and doors as well as areas where utilities come into the home such as water or gas or heating oil. They may seem like small areas but the cummulative effect can be a very inefficent home. I will peel off the old and come back over the area with the same good grade of silicon caulk. I use silicon because it is flexible and can move with big weather changes without breaking the seal. It costs me about forty dollars in caulk but is well worth it. Like insulation to little is always the problem that you encounter. No one wants bugs invading their living space and preventing such does not mean you need a profession exterminator. You may want to have your house checked for termites and treated but that regular but spraying can be done by you with a good garden sprayer and a bottle of concentrated bug killer that covers a very wide range of bugs. Why buy concetrate, because it saves you a bunch of money. It goes a lot farther and lasts longer for a much better price. Think about buying those little bottles that do not last very long. Each time you buy one you are paying shipping costs, cost of the container, and you are helping pay the companies advertizing. In my last tenyears or so I have not bought half a dozen of those ready to go spray bottles. That expensive deck wash you do to clean in getting ready for retreating your deck can be done with a bottle of the concentrated dish washing liquid mixed fairly strong and sprayed on the deck with a two gallon garden sprayer, let set for five minutes and then gone over briskly with a goo heavy made broom. Make sure you have a few good dry days with warm temps and apply your water treatment or stain with the same sprayer. I always flush it out afterwards with some fairly cheap isopropal alcohol to clean the pick up tube and sprayer nozzel.

One of the added advantages of doing your own maintenance on your property is that you can catch things before they become big problems. I came back from a vacation and had to catch up on the yard work. In one corner of the yard that I do not see every day I found quite a few roof shingles that had been torn from the roof. I found more in the woods just outside of the yard/ Had someone else been paid to do yard work I might never have known that I had a problem on my roof. This could have easily cost me big time if we were in a period of high rainfall. This is a little outside the norm for most homes but I believe in catching some rainfall to recycle onto my plants. With water metters being used in more and more localitis it can become a money saver to. I use the large 50 gallon plastic barrels and divert some of my roof run off into them. You will need to hook up an overflow to go back into your drainage system for heavy rains but what you store in the drums can be great on your plants and help your pocket book also. For people who want to go even farther they can buy the two hundred to three hundred gallon tanks made to be buried from a farm equipment store and over time you will more than make back you investment. If you have pets that have the run of your yard you will have brown spots develope where they go to the bathroom. It is part of marking their terrritory and they will go back to some preferred spots over and over again. You might be tempted to try re seeding these spots but here is one way that might save you some money. When you see these starting to develope take your garden hose and set on a fine spray and soak the area really well. This will in effect dilute the urine to a point that the grass may come back. It does have to be done as often as possible. As a homeowner and also someone who took care of our rental property here are some ways that are so easy you wonder why you ever called a plumber in the first place. I had tenets that would call and say something was wrong with the hot water, it was way to hot. What I would find is that someone had probably run out all the hot water and to get it back quick the cut the thermestat up on the heater. All water heaters have a thermostat and it is up to you tp determine the temperature you want your hot water to stay at. I would check the heater and find it cut up to maximum. Cutting it back to a medium setting would solve the problem. I have two settings for my water heater. One is just slightly over the medium setting and the other is just below medium. The higher setting is for winter time and the other is for warm weather. It saves a lot of money in the long run. If you have a tank water heater invest in a insulation blanket made for them

and save some money. By doing your own work around the house you will save loads of money and you will also be knowlegable about the condition of your home and that knowledge can easily save you thousands. The other big place to save money to put in your pocket for whatever reason is in the grocery store. If you go regularry you will have noticed that things have gone up and continue to do so. If you just blindly go to the store and buy the same old things without ever noticing you are probably wasting hundreds if not thousands a year. I have always had a mind for numbers and always seemed to those that I paid attention to. It all started when I tried to stay within a certain total to stay on budget at the store. At first I would take a calculator and a list of things to buy with a close estimate of the cost. The calculator soon was not needed and then it was the lists turn. I now can the prices from my last visit and I am instantly alerted to prices that have gone up. The totals I have spent at any one time are calculated in my head. The most important thing not to do in the grocery store is to buy non food items and I include candy in this. You must if you buy car wax or kitchen utensile you are paying a higher price, much higher than one of the stores that sell these things as a regular part of their business. The grocery store for you should be buying sale items that you have compared at other grocery stores, unit price, what you pay per ounce and if it fits your family in this size. Bulk items can be great but only if you use all of it. Always be prepared to shop on a full stomach and with the little carts most stores provide. If you shop at a store because they say the beat everones prices on advertized items this. The key is advertized and generally less, far less than one percent of a stores items are advertized. There is little doubt that in America we waste billions of dollars because we do not shop around. Preplan you shopping trips and include trips to several locations to get the best prices if they are in close proximety of each other. Do not spend three dollars on gas to save a dollar on a food item. Plan your shopping to eliminate frequent return trips to the store during the week. If you do not start with a list of things you need you will end up buying what you already have or do not need. Beside the item on your list name the store where the best price is and note whether you have a coupon or not. Want to get around that limit two per customer on sale items. There are two ways to do that, you can take someone with you but you will have to check out seperetly. Or you can shop get your limit and go somewhere else and come back later to get your other two. Most stores and

manufacterers are cutting down on those double coupons and those doubling of in store coupons but you still should take advantage of what you can use. I still look at those major brand coupons and if they are for an item that I can not get in store brands I will use them. For the most part I buy those cheaper store brands and I see little difference in them. Be prepared to take advantage of those special sales that come along like Cambells soup in Tomato and chicken noodle at 50 or 60 cents each. I have bought as many as 20 or 30 cans in a day which will last me for several months. When they have done their sales on soup and I need more I will go to a dollar store as they have in house brands that are often 30 to 40 cents cheaper than the major brands. This is also often the best place to buy toilitry items as well as candy. Those buy one get one free sales can be great but first check the regular price for one as they are sometimes jacked up just for the two for one sale. Do get one of those customer preferred cards for everyone in your family so that no matter who goes to the store they can get the savings. Look around the store you are in to find any sales or closeouts and if the price is good and you will use it jump on it. For years now we have made stir fry but the noodles were always a problem untill we tried those supper cheap ramain noodles. They are a little to salty but after you boil them rinse them in hot water to get rid of some of the salt. They are also great for lunch as with a sandwich you can eat for under a dollar. Never buy those prepackaged foods like hamburger patties or whole chickens cut up. You will be paying for someone else to make and package something for you that you can do in afew minutes. I have been cutting up whole chickens for years and can often save several dollars over the prepackaged stuff. We love healthy fresh foods, thats why we have a garden but unless you have a lot of land you will not be able to grow some of the things you will want. In the fall I will go to the farmers market and buy up to 150 pounds of potatoes and store them in my garage where it is cool and dry. We also buy our eggs two dozen at a time and get the super big ones and we only pay about what we would pay for small eggs in the store. If you do not mind canning you can get some good deals on quantity and can it up for the winter. You can also freeze or dry a lot of the things you find at the farmers market. Tomates can be blanched and baged in freezer bags for use later. You want to buy them when everone at the market has plenty as that is when the price is lower. Squash can be cut up and frozen but what I do is cut it up, let it dry a little and then grind it up combined with some bisquick and

an egg and form patties. I then put the patties into a freezer bag seperated by a little wax paper and months later when the price is high eat some cheap squash. People often say where do you store all this stuff. I have shelves about waist high in my garage that is perfect for storing jars and dry goods. Just make sure you always keep the door closed and any space where a mouse can get in closed off because they will find it if the get in. I do not like to complain but with prices so high on everything if you get a product and have a problem with it you should go online and give the lot numbers and the problem you are having. I had some cans of dog food and the pull tabs were breaking off and the lid was set to low for a can opener to work. When I checked the mail a few weeks later I recieved a coupon for a case of dog food. It is a good thing to do also because if noone complains the manufacturer will not know they have a problem. I buy a tremendous amount of product on the day of its expiration date. It is still perfectly good and it is often marked way down. Some people find this disturbing but you have to understand the store can not freeze that fish or steak but you can buy it on that last day and freeze it and you will have essentially the same thing as the person who bought theirs two days before you and piad full price. It is starting to taste pretty good now is it not. You can fill your freezer for the rest of the year and pay 20 percent or more less. You have to be there at the right time so I go in and look for what I want and memorize the expiration date, you can write it down and plan a shopping trip for that day. Get there early as other people know this. You will not always get what you want but I have a list of secondary items I will buy if marked down. Always to be safe make sure that you either fix it that day or freeze it as soon as you get home. Grocery stores throw away tons of good food in a years time some even tons per month. I as the manager about dented cans and if they are not to bad get them and save a lot. Ask and you might just receive but if you do not ask you are sure to get nothing. I have even bought yogurt on its last day and frozen it. To thaw it out put it in you fridge and enjoy a healthy snack for a tiny amount of money. I often go by y favorite store to get those heavy duty shipping boxesw some of their product comes in. On one trip I picked up one of those wax impregnated boxes only to find it a little heavy. Upon opening it I found it stuffed full of one pound bags of peanuts sealed in their plastic bags. I said what the hell they could not have gone bad already. Plenty of places where you get peanuts will not be as fresh as these. They had ed their day aand no doubt new stock was there to replace them. It was far to much for a family to eat so I gave some to everyone I

knew and still had four bags left. Even a month after their expiration date they were just great. Farmers markets do not usually have sell by dates but they often have picked fresh today or the day before. When it is not sold that day it may take a different place on the table. I will even though I am often seeing there make a deal at the end of the day to buy some of that not so fresh anymore produce at a nice discount and use it or can it for later use. In any business where the sellers pack stuff up to take to a different location to sell they will hate to pack it up to take back home, this is especially true of perishable items like fruits and vegetables. At the end of the day the advantage es to the buyer in most instances. And I have found that if they have a little over a pound and they are about to close the pound you buy may be more than a pound. I am big on buying items in their concentrated form, things that I can custom mix to my taste or mix to stretch a dollar. I buy concentrate laundry detergent as well as fabric softener. I find the ready to use stuff to be a little on the strong side, especially the fabric softener. What I end up with is about a 50 percent gain in loads for detergent and even more on the fabric softener. I take a quart or gallon milk bottle well washer and measure out the amount of concentrate I will use in each size, pour a measured amount in and mark with a marker amount of concentrate to use then I fill to the quart or gallon mark and mark it also. In this way you get consistency as well as savings and you lesson the amount of plastic that goes to the land fill. I will mix my own orange juice from frozen concentrate and water it down a little to make it go farther. You can also do this with household cleaners and of course my super saver automotive windshield washer fluid, the summer kind not the winter kind with poisonous antifreeze in it. I can clean all the windows in the house as well as outdoor furniture at a tenth the cost of that store window cleaner. Use you imagination when it comes to saving money on houshold items and keep safty in mind and watch the dollars pile up.

Chapter 3

The different venues

Venues where you can buy items for your collection or to resell are really varied and abundant in the extreme. Even though I live in a very small town I do not have much of a problem finding things for sale. This is an easy one, anywhere you find a for sale sign you can fell at ease coming up and asking some questions. It may be a forsale sign on a car but after asking about it whether you want it or not ask if the owner has anything else for sale. When they sell their own cars instead of trading them chances are the do the same with other things they are planning on selling. You might get lucky at hit them on a day when they offer you a gem of a deal simply because you asked. I always ask about coins, sterling silver and of course gold. This is where you really need that knowledge to be able to determine if you are getting a good deal or you should negotiate or simply walk away. Gold and silver are being sold every day and the price goes up and down with the market and to keep myself safe I always stay in my offers around 60 percent of the spot price that day. At this price I feel comfotable that I can always make a profit on either one. Gold and silver are easy, when it comes to buying coins. It is a whole different ball game. Precious metals are simply priced as to their purity, the amount in weight of the pure metal. Coins are valued as to their rarity and to their condition and condition alone can mean the difference in thousands of dollars. The most I ever bid was 1150 dollars for a 1926d dime and I did not get it as a doctor was willing to pay more. Gold can be found in many forms from jewelry to coins to high end decorative items and it can be found in nugget form as it came out of the ground. Gold is typically 10k, 12 k, 14k 18k and24k or pure gold and nuggets can be anything but are generally more purity than most jewelry. And nuggets also carry a on price simply because the demand for a nugget usually exceeds supply. Clad gold or gold that is plated to another base metal can have some value but generally only on very large pieces. As an example a gold plated coin might have just a few thosanths of one onze, or a few

penneys worth of gold. Most coins that are gold plated are vitually worthless as they have been altered from the way they came from the mint, or they came from a private mint, and the gold on them is not even close to their face value. Face value is for a quarter 25 cent, a dime is ten cents. Back to gold, you will find gold in ten karat more as the price keeps going up. Ten k is a purity of .4166 percent and an troy ounze of gold is 31.1 grams so if you have a piece of gold jewelry marked 10k and it weighs 31.1 grams you have less than half an oz. Of pure gold. You would want to take the spot price that day for a troy oz and multiply it by .4166 to get the value in pure gold of the piece. Then you would want to multiply this by the percent of its full value at which you would buy it. As I said my number is .60 percent which leaves me lots of room to stay safe and make a prifit should I sell. Why do we use troy oz instead of our weight system. Well the troy oz has been used for so long it is just a world wide accepted way to set the price of one troy oz of gold. The same is true of sterling silver, pure silver and any percentage of pure silver. At 12 k gold is 50 percent pure and a troy oz. Piece would have half an oz. Of gold. With 14k gold items we are at a purity of .5833 percent pure gold. At 18 k a piece would contain .75 percent pure gold. You have to be sure of the markings denoting karat wt. As some pieces are poorly marked and some are marked to deceive the unwary buyer. I always carry a ten power lupe and a twenty power piece as it is just to costly not to be sure. Look for uniformity in the markings and watch for hand engraved marks as these would be reason to walk away. The marks should be evenly spaced and all of the same uniform size. Also watch for signs that a ten k mark has not been restamped with an 8 to make it look like a 18k. The values are so high that you will encounter deception. If a piece is marked gold filled you are looking at a minimal amount of gold even if it says 14k gold filled. Gold has a specific color to it and by looking at a lot of know quality pieces you will know what I mean. More than a few people have perchased what they thought was gold only to find they have a close substitute that is worthless. The only way to be sure of the weight of a gold piece or a silver piece is to carry a scale with you. I carry a pocket model that goes to 4 oz. Troy and find this to serve most of my needs. With larger pieces you would want an electronic desk top model that has been certified by a company that verifies that scales are dead on. Do not move the scale as even this can through it off. You can buy a used one from the same company usually and get it for a reasonable amount. Do

realize that dealing in gold and silver is a risky buisness and if you do not know what you are doing you can loose more than your posterior. But you can also make a lot of money. I will provide one example of one of my transactions in which I made 3,000 dollars. Granted I had been buying silver, sterling and coin, from silver being 7 dollars a troy oz and when I sold some it was 35 dollars an oz. I still have a lot of silver and a desent amount of gold but I am not in any hurry to sell. Silver is also weighed in troy ozs. And is 31-1 grams per troy oz. And is normally found in two puritican. Sterling is a .925 or 92.5 percent pure. The other would be our coin silver which for the most part is .800 or 80 percent pure. There are some older flatware pieces that are marked dwt or penney weight. Twenty penney weight is the same as a troy oz. Most and I have a lot of these are marked 12 dwt. Or about 54 percent silver. The British mark sterling with a lions head stamp and Italian pieces are generally marked .925 You can go online and get the descripions of all the markings and print it out. Some might think they only need to know our countries marks but we have a large amount of foreign silver in just about any configuration you can imagine. Knowing what it is really worth is a leg up on your competion, the price the piece will get you if melted down. But this is not the whole story. I mentioned that I stick with a 60 percent of melt value to keep me safe. You will find stores that will buy your silver and gold and what they offer you can be anything from next to nothing to something close to melt. When I sell I send a large quanity directly to a refinery here in the North. They usually give me 90 percent of the spot price on the day that all my silver is graded. If you go around buying silver and gold and pay 80 percent of melt and expect to make a profit you might actually loose money. The melt price goes up and down and what a middle man or even a refinery offers you can change. I look for the market to trend to a high price having my metals already boxed along with my estimate of its actual weight and when the time is right I ship it 2 to tree day delivery with insurance. Now for some twist on the values of gold and silver metals. If you have a gold pocket watch that was owned by General Robert E. Lee and you send it off to be melted the chances are the person who recieves it will save it from melting and end up selling it for a five or six figure price while you receive hundreds of dollars. There are many degrees of value on precious metals simply because of ties they have to something famous or someone famous or that they are especially beautiful or rare. You would probably not want to melt pieces of Wallace Grand Baroque flatware or tiffaney pieces. I have had both and I recieved many multiples of their melt value. I have artist signed pieces and

pieces sought after by collectors that makes them worth much more than a melt price. I live just across the mountain from Lexington Virginia and if you know your history you will know that Robert E. Lee was the head of the Washington law school untill his death. I was buying sterling and I was searching the area for high grade plate and sterling when I came across a hodge poge of a set in Lexington. Going thru it I found a piece of R.E. Lees flatware. You really need to look all this stuff over carefully before melting. In another set I found a coin silver piece marked Philadelphia and had I not looked thru it would have melted it for a fraction of its value. You might also be surprised at the number of people who will sell or send off to be melted pieces of jewelry with with diamonds or other gem stones and never consider the value of the gems. They can often far exceed the value of the metal. You also have a lot of jewelry that was made by famous makers like Tiffany which are worth a from the name alone. When you send something to be melted it will probably be lost forever so you need to look and remove gem stones for pieces that have no special value. Weighted pieces deserve a little attention and will be encountered often. The first I will call gold or silver with gems. If you weigh a piece with a gem you will not get an accurate metal value. What I have done is remove gems from different size pieces or pieces already missing the gems and record the weights to have a reference to go by when buying or bidding. The second is sterling pieces marked weighted. Candle sticks and compotes will have weight poured into their bases and also have a piece of steel running up into the piece to prevent them from being bent to easily. You will have to tear apart a few different sizes of these pieces to get the real silver content weight in order to know what to safely pay for such pieces. And if you seend some silver to a refinery you should have already done this weight removal before hand to speed up prossesing of your shipment. I do not know about all refinerys but I generally send 10 to 20 pounds of silver that has had the junk removed. Different refinerys may accept different amounts but mine likes a least 10 pounds. I must make mention of this as I have seen it happen more than once. At auctions with gold watches I have seen people put the watches on a scale and weigh it. The problem being that you are also getting the watch works that are not gold along with other nongold pieces. I have torn them apart and I know pretty close what to bid but I have seen them go for four times the gold content and they did not run. Now that I have covered the basics of precious metals you will find at just about

any of the places you will go to to buy lets get on to the different venues. The ones that come to mind first are the large Flea markets, the ones that have been operating in the same location for years. As far as I know every state has them and many have more than one or two. I have two that are within 50 miles of me, both having been there before I ever started going to flea markets. My two are examples of what has happened in todays economy and cover the extremes. The one that is the longer ride is thriving with plenty of local money to be spent. The other is in an economically depressed area and prices realized are at very low levels. What amazes me is that the one which has suffered still has many of the same dealers as they had years ago. In fact they still have dealers coming in from all the surrounding states. This is the one I would choose to go to to buy for my collection or to pick up pieces to resale as I will find the better deals there. You might ask yourself why would dealers continue to come to a venue that is at best a break even proposition. There are several answers for this and the first to come to mind is that maybe where they come from is even worse as far as buyers are concerned. The next but not most important is a matter of we have been coming here for years. We are creatures of habit and sometimes that is hard to break. The third reason is possible that they come to buy. Like me some of them my make the assumption that they can make a little money while there but they can buy items that they can make money on when they return home. The last thing would be that they can not get tables anywhere else. The flea market near me that is doing well has a waiting list for dealers tables. You might find this hard to believe but some are a matter of one of the dealers ing on before a table becomes available and I do not mean ing in the highway way. Another that comes to mind is the Miami Flea market which has been a money maker for so many years that you could not bribe your way into a spot. What all this means to you is that you need to do your research before you jump in. Finding a flea market that is going gang busters is not hard and buying stuff to take to a flea market is not hard either but after you have done the first two and you find out you can not get into the good ones is a mistake that finds you with a lot of inventory and less places to sell it. If you have already done the first two I will give you a way out in the following chapter on how, when, and where to sell. One of the best reasons for going to the right flea market is the variety of things you can find. Historical items are scattered all around the country but there are what I call hot zones. I live in Virginia and when it comes to colonial pieces and

civil war artifacts you will not find a better place. We are also a costal state and that brings in nautical items. We are ripe with historical documents from early colonial on. In fact I am surrounded by property owners whose land deads are land grants from King James of England. What all this means to you is increase you chances of finding a variety of items to sell and also try to put yourself where you might find that item that puts big dollars in your bank . We as a country are ripe with what I call the raw materials that produced some of the best art pottery and art glasss as well as a hundred other items you can make money on. Where else can you find early Coke items along side original Audabon prints. You will find that in the area around a now famous pottery there are people who maybe had a relative who worked at the pottery or the pottery may have given off quality pieces to employees if they asked for them. I am close enough to West VA. That I get some of the pieces from some of their best glass works and I will often pick up more than one piece from the same person. To give you an even better example of what can be gained by looking in the right places I just have to go back to my early teen years. At the time parents would sometimes send their kids to a cousins house for a week or weeks to as much as a summer. Families were closer then. My cousins in Petersburg would often come here to spend the summer fishing and swimming in the river a stones throw from my house and to play in the woods that surrounded us. AQt the time I did not thing much about it but they lived at what was the crater in Petersburg, This was a famous location where the civil war degenerated into a trench war and lasted there for a long time. This time in my life was a time of sling shots and any ammo you could find for them. The sandy soil was not good for rocks so we would dig a litle and find plenty of civil war musket balls and mini bullets. We shot them by the hundrds into the near by pine woods and anywhere else there was not a house. Some of the things we found would be worth hundreds od dollars now and all I can say I bought back home was a large fragment of an eight pound shell. I almost dare not tell you the number of rare marbles we shot away with our sling shots as marbles were plentiful. You will have to decide where you will look and what you plan on selling or collecting but I am just trying to make it easier and more profitable to do if you do some research first. You will find some small local flea markets that are made up mostly of local yard sellers. They will usually be made up of those yard sellers that put out the

same thing week after week until they sell it or it falls apart from old age. I would not totally ignor them but I would only give them a real quick through to see if there were any newbys there. You should key in on younger operators that have the good stuff. It is not a hard and fast rule but it is often the case that they are the least knowledgable. There is one more flea market that I have never told anyone about and it was very ato say the least. It was held several times a year, the first in early fall and the second about tax time. It was for firearms dealers and collectors and this was before all the gun laws were inacted. It was closer to a family reunion than a gun show but it allowed people to try to buy guns that were either hard to find or I am sure some that were illegal. You would get a phone call with the time and location which would be some farm or land out in the middle of nowhere. At the time most of my firearms were new or pieces in my collection so I did not feel a great nned to go and only did once. One of the best things about flea markets is that you can hone your bargaining skills and practice a little phycology while you are at it. The art of bargaining down the price of something you want to buy is indeed an art. Even those hard nosed dealers with the sign up saying prices are firm can sometimes be broken. You never want to make a few mistakes that people often make. One is to walk up and say that I have to have that. It is like going into a car sales mans office and handing them a blank check and saying you fill oin the amount. You have lost the advantage, the only one you had as the buyer. You might get lucky and the dealer gives you a little off an already inflated price. Yes that is what it is in 99.9 percent of the cases. The dealer puts a price on a piece that is the highest they could possibly expect for the piece. It may even be twice what they paid or many more times what they paid. I have sold things for thousands of times what I paid. The other worst mistake is to zero in on the object of your desires and to keep coming back to it. The dealer will if any good key in on this and know what you are after. Try looking at a little bit of the inventory first and give some pieces you do not want the once over as if you are interested. Then engage the dealer in some convesation. Ask them where they are from and how they got into this buisness in the first place. Even give them a compliment as to their presentation of their wares. You will probably find a story coming out giving you a history of their lives. When you get a chance but do not interupt add that that is similar to the way you got into collecting. You now have a little personal information you

can use to relate to them and you have given them a chance to do something everyone loves, to talk about themselves. Now and only now can you start to zero in on what you want but for good measure ask about a few more pieces you do not want. See how much the dealer is willing to come down and you have an idea where to go on your item. When you give them a price you can pay start low low. They can only say no to your low ball offer. Then you have room to move up and they are more likley to move down. Never forget to tell them that your best offer is all you have to spend and that you chose them for the quality of their pieces. When you have done all you think you can do you can always come back just before closing when they might want to piut a few more dollars in their pocket. Even if you do not make any deals at the flea market you may be able to learn something. You can pick the brains of some of the better dealers and learn so not to does from the others. One thing that dealers are famous for a flea markets is talking. Most like to talk about their buisness just cut them some slack and wait till they are not busy. My most favorite active bidding and buying venue is the local auction and especially country auctions. They are so varied as to content and are an advanced course in not paying to much. They also give you experience with auctioneers of all kinds from the newby to the been at it all my life. As a young man I would go to auctions to add coins to my collection but also to bid people up. It was a dangerous thing to do but it was a really good education in people. It really is not hard to spot those people who want something so bad they will pay a lot more than it is worth. They do it over and over. Their mind set at the time is that the piece is already mine all I have to do is pay. And this mind set does not allow you to buy the same piece as long as they have some money left. The last time I bid one of them up was on a 3/4 carat diamond ring. It was nice and it had an appraisal with it. A good price at auction for a piece with apprasal is anything up to about half the appraisal but I knew this woman was not going to stop. I ended up going up small amounts at the end but she still was seeing that ring on her finger so I made her pay two times the appraisal. I can not the time when I was bid up and stuck with something. For the most part I decide the m aximum I will pay when I go to the auction preview. You should always go to these even if it has to be two hours before the auction. This is your time to determine what has value and what you can make money on. you will find plenty of pieces that have defects and not the ones made by the factory. Some will be in your face obvious and some will be worked on to hide them. It is your

job to look over and exclude those that are not sellable at full price. A pristine piece of collectable and easily sold item will not bring the prices that it did just half a dozen years ago. It will make you cry to see what it sold for then and what it sells for now. Your job is to know the difference between what will bring a good price and what will sell for what someone hopefully not you just paid. True collectors will always be willing to pay a good price for missing pieces from their collection. But like me, and I changed my policy on buying, choosimg to waite to find a piece at a better price somewhere down the road. If I think I can find it cheaper I will on it even though I need it. And I am not alone as many other collectors have changed their policys as well. Never ever be the first to bid on an item you want as this sends the signal to everyone that you want it. I prefer to set back and let the bids stall before I jump in and that is often the time when the item will sell within a few bids. By staying out of the bidding for as long as possible you send fewer clues as to what you are interested in and you can spend more time studying other bidders which will tell you a lot. You will pick up on those that will only bid if they think they can get it cheap. You will also see the ones that will pay retail or above and you want to avoid these at all costs. You will see the ones who the hawkers key in on to get them to keep bidding long after they should have stopped. I get up and walk around sometimes bidding and sometimes just looking but when bidding the hawkers would have to chase me to do their dirty work and so far none has tried. Pay special attention to those husband and wife teams and you will see visual or even physical cues that one or the other wants the bidding to stop from the other. With them as my only competition I can guess just about how much I will pay. An absolute auction is just that, if a penney is the only bid it sells for a penney. And when an auction starts by asking for twenty five dollars you do not have to start there and when it climbs to fifty dollars and the auctioneer calls for seventy five fell free to bid fifty one dollars. Because I know most of my auctioneers well if I only want to bid on one more piece I will discreetly ask one of the helpers to ask if they could put my item up soon, do not shout out would you please put up the sterling flatware. In total never let people at the auction pattern you, change things up every so often and always look at things you do not want to bid on as much as the pieces you do want. On auctions you may find that you will want to use them to sell some of your pieces from time to time. As I mentioned early on in my book I bought a lot of Indian Artifacts at a local auction for mere pennies per piece which was a shame

for the seller. This is a good lesson for you when you decide to sell. Auctioneers have certain followers that always attend their auctions and these people are keyed in on certain things they collect and will often not even bid on something that is a great buy. A year after this auction in the same town Indian artifacts were sold by a different auctioneer and there were numerous bidders, the difference was night and day and the prices went through the roof. Keep a book on your auctioneers and determine what their followers pay good prices for. You will then know should you decide to sell a little which auctioneer should get what items to give you the best chance to make some good money. We all will have our favorite collectables and auctions may not always be the place to find our specalty items. Flea markets and shows that feature our interests are better for zeroing in on our wants. The deal with auctions is you can get some great deals and you will find some of the things you are looking for. The most important step in auctions happenes when the auctioneer has a preview. This will normally occur the day before the auction is held and will generaly be later in the day to allow them to set up. This is normal for both indoor and outdoor auctions. Check with the auctioneer before hand as some only have a two to three hour period before the auction begins. Either way this is the time for you to bring your auction kit, flash lite, magnifying glass. tape measure, digital camera, note book and pen, diamond tester, mini scale and whatever else you might need. For the actual auction I add water, coffee, and a snack. Your time to look around without a lot of distractions is presious so use it well. List everything you will certainly bid on and items you might bid on, take a picture and look the item over very carefully using yuor light to look for defects or repairs. List each piece in your notebook as you come to it along with all details, size, color, condition. Now that you are done it is time to get to work for the auction. Take your book and your computer and start looking the pieces up. You will want to note prices but realize You can ask any price it is what it actually sells for that is important. Use your measurements as in vases from famous makers size does matter. It is best to find three or four listings for the same item you plan to bid on and then write in a price far below the average listing, this is your high bid price and sticking to it will reward you in the long run. I have been to hundreds of previews and I seldom see more than a few other bidders there but for them I will pick up a few pieces that I wont be bidding on just to throw them off. Now get a good nights sleep and pack up your auction kit to be ready in the morning.

Getting to the auction early is good as you want a good seat up front and on one end or the other. If you are new to the auction business you will wonder how so many people could possible be bidders. No woories mate, I know regulars that go to all the auctions but never bid on anything, I guess it is a form of entertainment to them. This is your last chance to give everythng the once over. Why you ask, because things may have been moved, broken, or pulled from the auction. As these auctions are as is where is there is nothing worse than bidding on a piece that was perfect at the preview only to find it chipped or cracked when you have won the bid. This last preview is also your chance to catch any mistakes you made the day before. Be sultle on this last look around by picking up plenty of things you do not want. Your job is to make it hard for anyone to key in on what you will bid on. Now all your preperation has given you an edge that others do not have and as long as you stick to your maximum bid you will either get what you want on some items and avoid paying to much for others. You only have two enemies when you hold up your card to bid, yourself if you bid to much, and the auctioneer who wants you to bid to much. No matter what else I do I check my emotions the minute I step out of the car. Some of your competitors will gauge success by how many items they win the bid on. I evaluate my success as how many quality items of high quality I win on. It may be only two or three but that is ok. Now I keep notes while the auction is going on as to all the actual selling prices on the items I had picked to bid on. Does the devil really have his minions who try to get you to do things you know you should not do, the answer is yes and you will find them at the auctions. I call them the screamers or the hawkers like the old guys that tried to get you to go into the side show. They are there to get you to bid higher and higher. They will get up in your face trying to start a bidding war between you and another bidder with taunts like you do not want to let them outbid you. As they are a hugh distraction and downright nasty especially if their deoderant is starting to wear off I developed a method to neutralize them and foll my competition at the same time. When one of my items is about to come up I get up and walk around keeping eye with the one important person in the crowd. The auctioneer. This also serves to take me out of the field of view of others bidding. I keep moving and bidding when I need to and sometimes those bidders who bid because I am will loose track of me and stop bidding. It is totally up to you to keep track of what is going on at the auction Most auctioneers are not really good at what they do, they seem to have a habit

of taking a 5 hour auction and turning it into an 8 hour one. One of my regulars actually brought in what was supposed to be a fast auctioneer and he was as far as the bidding went but he started each bid with a joke or what he thought was a joke and interjected stuff inbetween and he ended up doing one of the longest auctions I ever attended. Talking fast does not a good auction make. When it comes to auctioneers never up a new by. For one they are prone to make mistakes like lump things together that should be sold seperatley or not fully describe an exceptional piece that deserves it. They may also have the newby crowd that often comes to new auctions. The people are creatures of habit holds true as one of my favorite auctions has a certain crowd and another that directly competes with them often has few crossover bidders. This is a bad way to do things for the collector or the reseller as you limit yourself to a small part of the market. My best ever coin auction ever was conducted by a newby. He operated in an ading town just 15 miles away but had the cheapest bidders I have ever seen. He would travel around in a van getting consignments to add to a twice monthly auction and hold it under a tent next to a little house he used to store the items. Over a peoiod of months I bought a lot and some of it was complete collections of U.S. cions but one auction in particular There was a colonial or English half penney dated 1701, this in itself was rare but the condition was uncirculated which bumped it up in rarity by a factor of ten. As few of his bidders knew the values of anyt thing nice I won the bid on the half penney for 50 dollars, likely a twentith of its worth if not even more. Never at your peril miss out on the new by auctioneer. Adverse conditions are my favoite time for an auction, Give me pounding punishing rain, sleet, ice or snow, or 100 degree temperatures and I will be there with bells on. All of these will knock down the numbers of those attending and will cut down on the real bidders to. For whatever the reason they do not show up, a spouse who says you are not going out in this, or they do not have four wheel drive it does not matter to me, I always get there. One in particular was the best auction I ever attended as it was icy out and sleeting near the time of the auction. I will never understand why it was not canceld but I heard thet it was a niece and her brother who had inherited their uncles estate and were in a hurry to turn it into cash. Even the preview was lightly attended as the weather was already coming in but I was astonished by what was there before me when I arrived. As far as pieces bought it was may largest but it also set a record for some of the lowest prices I have ever piad for quality material. None

of the regular serious collectors were there and the other bidders did not even know the difference between the good stuff and the great stuff. I ended up loading my jeep grand cherokee down and even had to fold the seats down. It was so good that one piece from that auction sold and returned back more then I spent for everything. Ten people could have gotten high on the amount of endorphins racing thru my brain. This is what it is all about and once you feel it you will be hooked forever. Getting to know your competition can pay you dividends in more waays than one. I am friendly with them all and always speak when I run into them. You might think this strange but the old saying keep your friends close but your enemies closer is valid. I help them when they ask me a question and I listen when they tell me of their collection and even when and where they go on vacations. All knowledge is usefull as long as you know what to do with it. If I find a piece I know they want I will offer it to them, for a profit of course. If at an auction with pieces they will want I will try to get them to agree to not bid on my pieces and I will not bid on theirs. And when a good auctioncomes up with them on vacation I will be sure to be there. Get to know your auctioneers as this is just another part of the process. Some auctioneers will hang on the going, going, gone or the going once, twice, sold. You have to be ready and watching the auctioneer. Others go so fast that it is really hard to get your bid in before they sell it. On auction set ups I have seen all kinds, good and bad. With a couple tables up front and ten things on them I have seen helpers set the item being bid on back down on the table. If you are in doubt as to what is up for bids shout out and find out. It is better than buying something you do not want. I have even seen the auctioneer confused as to what is being sold. It takes some planning to lay out an auction properly and some seem to prefer to just wing it. I have also seen auctions where the helpers carry around hugh pieces of furniture through the crowd but I have never seen the sense in it. Two things that are done and I have encountered both are when an auctioneer slips the bid to a particular person. They move so fast on that last bid it is up to them to say who won it. At a great antique auction I had my eye on a sterling silver trophy dated 1902. It was a large piece and the only other interest I saw in it was from the lawyer who handled the estate. I waited and waited untill I saw the lawyer carring it around. It had never gone up to bid but was probably already a done deal before the auction began. And lastly I have seen auctioneers

jump the bid up when no one actually bid it up. The last bidder is left to really quickly decide if they want to bid again. The people at auctions can be a source of entertainment in themselves. The last auction I went to a husband and wife had taken up positions on oppisite sides of the crowd. A china cabinet was being bid on and these two ended up bidding against each other. The crowd caught on pretty quickly but they did not until the auctioneer told them, but only after the bid had climbed a bit. This is something you will see happen, someone bids up more than they can pay and then has to tell the auctioneer. They will then ask the next highest bidder if the want it at their last bid. You should not do this, let them start it all over again. The bidder who backed out may bid some but you know they will not reach their failed bid level so you are likely to get it cheaper than your last bid. You may just get it much cheaper. You will run into those bidders I refer to as second chance bidders. They will be the last bid most times before your winning bid and they will approach you and try to buy what you just outbid them on for a few dollars more than you paid. I simply tell them that if I did not want it I would not have bid on it in the first place. It amazes me just how often this will happen. Another case is when you buy a box lot or set and do not really want some of the pieces. If someone who bid on the lot approaches me and asks to buy what I really do not want I will tell them that I really wanted this piece but for the right price I will part with it. Over and over again I have gotten half to all the price I paid for the whole lot and never left the auction and still have the piece I want for zero dollars. Reserve auctions are widespread but most are just a few items in an absolute auction where everything else sells for whatever the high did was. They will often have a reserve on cars or the home. The high end art auctions on the other hand often have a lot of reserve items if not all of them. At these if the reserve is not made unless the buyer releases the auctioneer from the reserve. Auction fees can trip you up unless you pay close attention. It is fairly common now to see a buyers of 10 percent which means if you won the bid at 100 dollars you will pay 110 dollars. You will also pay state tax unless you have a state tax number for that state. I have seen prices as high as 25 percent buyers , but this is most commonly found on the net along with separate shipping charges on each item won even if the could be combined for a lower shipping cost. You have to look and if you do not see it ask the auction company about these fees. And as a last note do not take le car to an auction where you plan to buy a dining

room set. It is up to you to get it home. I love estate sales when they are run by out of town family and always go to everyone I can Every body has a little collector in them and nowhere else is it more evident than an estate sale. With people generally living longer although the health care system is great we have started to reverse the trend as opposed to Canada, we have many generations often represented in estate sales. Getting there first is utmost but come prepared with your kit and hopefully your I phone to access the net. Go around quickly and pick out as much as you can safely carry and take items back to the owners and ask them to hold them untill you are done. You will have to look them over more closely before buying as there will be broken repaired pieces and restored pieces and you want to exclude these. This will not always happen but often enough that you need to be prepared for it. The owner will tell you what it is selling for on the net. You have to counter that it is what it is listed for not selling for. It is up to you whether you tell them that you are buying to resell but it has been my experience that it turns most sellers off to you. You will hit upon those pieces that they say have sentimental value and you have to say to your self why then are they selling it. And as far as I know I have never seen a price guide for sentimental values. You simply must tell them that you can not pay for sentimental value as no one else will either. Find out a little about the sellers, are they local or from out of town. If the latter. They will be more inclined to strike a deal especially if they only have two days and they have a lot to sell. Then dicker, dicker that price down, buying the best items first and the most easily sold second. How do you plan for estate sales when you may have ten listed for the same day in your area. Go out and check out the addresses and how big the houses are and are there storage buildings. Yuo might be looking at another collectors estate and that could be a jackpot for you. I geneally leave the best neighborhoods for somewhere in the middle of my travels that day as generally they will have high prices in high priced areas. estates can have accumulations from a family going back centuries and even the most humble home may have the find of a lifetime. I was coming home from an estate sell when I saw what I knew were items from a grandfather and his sons estate setting out on the lawn. It was an un advertized sale and I was the first one there. I spent every bit of cash I had including my emergency stash and walked away with some seldom seen items from early America. I stopped by the next day but kept going when I saw an auction appraisers truck parked in the yard. It was good for that one day only and

I am hlad I was able to take advantage of it. Lesson to learn, always keep handy plenty of cash as cash is king in this buisness. There are a lot of auctioneers and others doing estate sales for the owners and the number grows every year. Some as in every thing else have people who do not know what they are doing. You have to check them out to find out whether they are the real deal or just out to make themselves money. You can tell quickly if they know what they are doing or not by the prices they have on some of the things you would want. If they are way to high you might as well forget it and let some sucker buy them. If they are reasonable see if they will come down and if all else fails ask if they will come down if you buy multiple items from them. I group things together to get a better price every where I can do it from flea markets to estate sales. As with anything take family stories about items and their history as what they are, stories. That Walther pistol that belonged to Hitler is just a Walther pistol without iron clad proof. Besides if you buy it you will probably go home and find out it was made 40 years after the war. Get it in writing is a good way to go any time you buy something that may have historic value just don’t pay that value untill you are sure. If you have something down on paper you will have something to start with. If you trust your memory you will have nothing. That very last day of an estate sale especially when the owners are going home the following day can be golden. If there were a lot of estate sales that weekend they may also have a lot left. The only way your advantage to bargain down could only be better if when you drove up you found a yard full of bill collectors. What is a yard full of bill collectors good for, Artillery practice for the military thats what. This is a parting shot for all those rookies out there, and it is not to buy trailers, cars or anything without a title especially from out of town sellers as you may spend more on getting a clear title than you saved with the good deal you got. Pickers and picking is a topic I wont give a lot of time to even though some might consider me a picker. They generally do not have very good reputations and they are famous for taking advantage of the elderly which I have seen firsthand in my own neighborhood. Picking can be as good or as bad as you want it to be. You can drive around and intrude on peoples lives who really do not want you there. Or you can post buisness cards and go to places where you are invited. You can go door to door knocking and asking if they have anything to sell or you can set up in a motel room and advertize and let them come to you. I

consider what I do as being honorable as for the most part I let people give me their price and I try to get it down a bit. I do not offer people pennys on the dollar for what their stuff is worth. I count on knowledge and do not consult an appraiser for what I buy What I have in common is that when I am dealing with another dealer or an antique shop I try to buy the best items they have for a price that I think I can make a profit on should I decide to sell it later on. They have chosen to hang a shingle saying that they are dealers and they should know what they are doing. Because so many of them do not I am able to pick up some fantastic buys that I feel good about. I never push myself on people preferring to let them come to me if they are undecided about selling something. It is probably a matter of semantics but I would never call myself a picker in the that defined them as I was growing up. Storage lockers or bins and the sale of the at auction is an area that I would probably never get into and the main reason is there are just not enough of them to make it worthwhile in ares other than large cities. You have to understand that if you live in a small or medium size town you may only see a few auctioned off each year. And even in the big cities you will have hundreds of lockers that are full of what was too large for the garbage men to take and a trip to the dump was to far away or to expensive. Granted there are really nice things in storage lockers and sometimes people with nice things can not pay there bills but it is not that often and you would have to travel widely and buy many junk storage lockers to even find a few. When you think about it who would choose to leave cash in a storage locker. Can you imagine the conversation that would prompt someone to do it. Your wife says honey get that junky money out of here and throw it away. And when it comes to guns I would have to say that is as rare as leaving money in a locker. There are just some things of value that most of us like to keep in close proximity to us where we can see that it is there every day and not have to woory about it. Even I would concede that things like cars and car parts and furniture and the like will be in those storage lockers but when the door is opened most everone there will see them. You also have the problem of selling all that stuff and that is a requirement as far as I know, ay least it is locally, you have to remove everything. If you do not have a second hand store or live in a really large city you are going to have one hell of a time selling all that stuff. Why you might even be forced to rent a few storage lockers to store it all, ironic is it not! I have figured that just to go to the area where I could possibly buy them at auction would cost me several hundred dollars and that would be spent even if I

did not get a locker. This is a dangerous thing in itself as if you lay out that kind of money you are going to be tempted to try to get a locker, even overpaying for one that is full of junk. I see it as an insane way to gamble for 99.99 percent of the population. Now if you had a way of knowing what was in the locker and what kind of values you could expect that would be another matter altogether. And I have thought of ways to improve your chances of getting something good that might help and will them on but in no way am I saying it is a way you can make a living for if it were you would face thousands of bidders all wanting the same thing. If you are looking for easy money you will not find it here and if I were a betting man I would bet on the lottery before I would bet on lockers making a living for me. I have gone to sales at storage lockers, what you might call a garage sell and done quite well but I could see every thing I was trying to buy and I could dicker down the price. Moving sales are some of my favorites, especially when professional movers are moving the family. There is a list of things they do not want to transport and the prices they charge motivate a family to leave some things behind to sell in a moving sale. Go to a few and you will be suprised at what they do not want to take with them. Lawn and garden supplies are one along with lawn and garden equipment of all kinds. Building materials are seldom taken and this can be paints, stains, waterproofing and all kinds of lumber and finishing materials. Outdoor furniture is high on the list to be left behind along with boats and old cars. These cost a lot to move and if they are not running its even more incentive to sell them. You will also find those giant wall covering home entertainment pieces of furniture but they are not for me. I figure that each year I save several hundred dollars by buying at moving sales. I seldom sell what I get but choose to use it on my own property. For some reason those items they are not taking seem to be impossible for the owner to price as I buy things that would be 20 dollars at a hardware store and regularly get them for a dollar. These types of sales will require that you get there first to get the best deals as they will disappear faster than ice cream on a hot day. My personal best sale of this type was just down the street from my father in laws. I knew that the home was being remodeled but nothing more than that. When I saw the ad for the sale I went first thing the next morning. After buying a few

things inside and striking up a conversation with the owner I found out he was from out of town and inherited the house and rented it for a few years. In order to sell it he had it remodeled and sold it quickly. He now had to get everything out quickly for the new owners. When I drove up I saw an open garage full of lumber and a lot of other stuff for around the house. I asked him about the garage and he said it would almost be a favor to him if I would take it all. I told him I would give him five dollars for everthing and have it all moved out by late evening. The deal was done and now the work began. When people saw all that I was loading up they all asked if anything else was for sale in the garage and I happily told them I bought it all. I removed two big loads of treated lumber some of which was brand new and some from the old deck which had been replaced. I took home gallon jugs of bug spray and weed killer and two gallons of waterproofing one of which had never been opened. I took three trips to get it all and cost me a couple gallons of gas But I easily recieved 6 to 7 hundred dollars worth of matrerials for five dollars and the last trip I found a new deluxe garden sprayer in the corner still in its box. I had assumed it was an empty box. If you lived in a large city and owned rental property and had a good truck you could easily get a lot of the things you would need to keep up your rental property for very little money. Not knowing or not caring what things actually costs seems to be the norm at moving sales. Yard, garage and inside yard sales are without a doubt where I have gotten some of my best deals bar none. You have to have a method to the maddness as on any Friday or Saturday you might have far to many to get to them all. I work out my itenerary the day before the sale and stick to it. After going to them over and over you will find some that only have the stuff they did not sell the last time and some that are just selling worthless trinkets or clothes. I cross them off my list the very first thing and do not give them a second thought. I want the first timers and the occasional sellers in a good neighborhood. I prioritize them as to a 1, 2 3 and so forth and arrange them so that I do not drive from one side of town to turn around and go all the way across town again. There is no point buying something you can make five dollars on if you spen d six in gas getting it. I do not spend much time at any of them unless I have found some great stuff at good prices. I look for the best stuff and give it to the owner as I move around and pay when I leave. Some sales I will pull up in the car and if I can see everything from the car and nothing looks good just pull out and go to the next. The key is having a plan and sticking to it and moving as fast as you can without missing the good stuff.

Those people who spend a lot of time at one sale miss many items that someone else is buying at other sales. You have to look carefully at anything you are interested as these sales will have plenty of chipped and cracked items as well as missing pieces and mitch matched parts. A quick query as to whether the owner has any coins, silver or gold for sale takes a mere few seconds so ask as all you will hear at the worst is no. You will find a lot of people who do not know what they have from antiques that are really just forty years old to vintage items that have a sticker on the bottom from the pottery barn, You even have people who purposely try to deceive saying in their ad they have antiques or primitives when they have none. They are doing it to get the traffic to sell their stuff any way they can. They never receive a return visit from me and I let them know it before leaving. I even know one dealer who advertizes an estate sale at his mothers when all the things are from his shop. Anything and everything to get people to come. As you travel from sale to sale you will come across those that were not advertized. They may be in the same neighborhood as an advertized sale or just have some signs posted. If at a glance I see some quality pieces I will stop as long as I have hit my primary sales. If I still have some primaries to hit I will pick up some of the others on my way back home. It will always be a matter of getting there first and knowing what to buy and not much else matters but there are times when I am late getting out but I will still go to my primaries and do find things to buy that others have missed. Going this route in the buying and reselling world you just almost have to be ecclectic in your buying to get the volume to sell and make money. I have my main collecting interests in cions, art, and presious metals but I will never up a good deal on old toys, stem ware etc. when I find it at a yard sale as they don’t make anymore of the old stuff and what is out there is all that there is. As with everything else you need to keep records of what you buy at these sales as it will all blurr together somewhere down the road. You will always be assured to meet all kinds of people at these sales and that is part of the fun of it and when you find something that makes your week much the better. Thrift stores, second hand stores and old country stores can be a rich source of all things collectable. I have filled a book in my record keeping with things I have bought at one of the nationally known thrift stores. You might think that this as well as antique stores would not be the place to hunt but you would be wrong. Any place that resells has employees and those employees have different levels of knowledge in what it is, how rare is it, and how to price it. In this well known store while silver prices were at an all time high I bought sterling silver at some unbelievable prices. I get there when they first open and go to the areas

where they put the items I like to buy. I move quickly and take what I want as I go. One day I went by what is normally what I call the junk shelf and a silver platter caught my eye. Thr reason it did was it was engraved and it had a date of 1954 engraved into it. Silver was for so long so cheap that just about any engraved piece to be presented to someone was likely to be sterling. I grabbed it so fast I almost pulled my shoulder out of t. And sure enough on the back poorly stamped but readable was sterling silver. Silver was at 34 dollars and this was an eight inch platter with a heavy rolled edge. It was worth hundreds of dollars. This same store gave me a whole bag full of the 12Dwt silver knives and several rare porcelean serving covered dishes. The stem ware I took home at twenty five cents a piece would make any collector cry that they had not found it first. They also had this strange policy of pricing all golf clubs at one dollar each. In our area we have two of the oldest courses in America and I have picked up numerous wooden shafted clubs at the rediculous price of one dollar. For some reason everybody but me seems to ignor the clubs and I have gotten Golf Smiths and Callaways for the one dollar price. This store for a few years seemed to get in a lot of art work, some good some so so but all cheap. I bought the piece I mentioned earlier worth several thousand for just under two dollars and I got the oldest golf lithograph at 116 years old and a first printing for only forty dollars. You might have been thinking that I bought everything for a few dollars but I step up and pay when I know an item is worth far more than the price being asked. As I said it is often the employees that determine whether you get a good deal or not. I frequent a antique store in my area several times a month and on the last trip I saw a gone with the wind first addition lying out on a table. It had no price so I asked and expected to hear a price I did not want to pay but what I heard was four dollars. It almost flew off that table top into my hands. This just shows you that the stuff is out there even in places you would never expect to get a deal and it is calling your name as I write this. And because store owners do not like to pay good wages they get what they pay for and that item worth thousands gets marked up for two dollars. There are not to many old country stores now a days but there are a few and I love them. Most often they have been owned by the same family for generations and that is the key to why I hunt them You will not find them in the middle of the city as they are almost only a rural thing where paying a little more is better than along drive to the nearest town. I know of some that are still operating and still have some of the old stuff from years back. The most common item would probably be advertizing that their suppliers gave them in abundance for decades.

Most of these stores are on the small side and they did not have enough window space to put up much advertizing. You will have to ask and probably the only person who would know is the actual owner. Depending on the nature of and who the advertizer is you can make some real bucks if you get a good price on them. On those rare ones that are simply closed up with some old stock in them I have left notes on a window for the owner. So far I have yet to score a hit on one of these but I will not stop trying. These seem to be making a come back in a lot of areas and I am referring to Church Bazzars or silent auctions. Both of these are used by churches in my area to raise money for any number of reasons. You will generally find nice items at very good prices but you can also find cherished pieces donated to the church. That little old lady or that old man that you could never buy anything from seem to not mind giving some really great stuff as a donation to the church. Perhaps they are looking to the after life or they are doing it as an atonement it does not matter. You have to be there when they open the doors because other people know this secret to. I head straight for any paintings or prints that I see as these often come out of just such a sale. Only after this do I make my way around the room for any more worthy pieces. The silent part of this type of sale is just that. Each item will have a paper with it upon which you place a bid and your phone number. It might be later that day or the next before you know whether you have won any bids but I always come back later in the day and check the best pieces I bid on to see if anyone has outbid me. If they have and I think there is room on the price bid I will increase my bid. I preferr the straight out bazar sale over the auction but will not up either. Increasingly there are more and more on line yard sales for local areas on the web. I would always preferr to see the item in person but on some things you really do not have to. If I see a piece of sterling or a gold ring I will jump on it and then go make sure it is what it is said to be before handing over any money. Make sure you have your buyers kit with you but try not to look or act like a professional buyer or the seller may up the price or refuse to sell. I take out just a magnifier and my little digital scale when I walk up to the house. I am warry of unusual meeting places or ones out in the middle of know where and ask that it be somewhere public as this is a good way for someone to set you up to rob you. Call me overly suspecious but better safe than sorry. You will want to check the newest postings on these sights as you are never alone in you search for

something you can make money on. We have all the means at our disposal in the world now to find and buy items to collect or to sell and the only thing that will hold you back is laziness. My problem has been one of not enough hours in the day to look for all the oppurtunities out there and often find myself not sleeping much.

Chapter 4

What to buy, where and when

Frauds and fakes and reproductions are nothing new. They have been with us throughout time in many forms. The thing that has changed is we can now search the world looking and buying and have it shipped to us in days. With these changes has also come a larger supply of those nonoriginal pieces that will sometimes fool the experts. I will not pretend to give you all the answers but I will give you the tips and the methods for spotting some of the items before you have paid for them and bought them home. Being causious is the best de fence and with a little aquirred knowledge you can avoid a lot of costly mistakes. With the prices of the real McCoy being down for the last few years it has become that much more important not to buy reworked. or out and out fakes. And because they have been around for so long you can not count on age alone as proof it is what it is perported to be. People who are in their eighties bring out pieces they have had in their family ever since they can but they can still be fakes, just very old fakes or reproductions. Where do you find fakes, everywhere, even in museums where you would think they are never fooled. Even when we have doubts about an item we often rationalize that what we bought is the real McCoy and worth much more than we paid. As a collector we have to fight this human emotion and instead count on science and personal observation when we are about to make a perchase. The raw truth is we may hunt for years and never find that diamond in the rough at a rediculously low price. No matter whether you are a collector or a reseller the object is to make those common perchases that add to the net worth of your collection and or your bank . Avoiding fakes is job one as they decrease our net worth and will never bring their perchase price if you are an honest dealer. When you make a mistake learn from it and document it in your records for future reference. I am always surprised when I tell people about fake coins and their reaction is

one of surprise. The coin world is full of fakes so much that there are multiple places that grade and authenticate cions for a hefty fee. For the other stuff out there you will have to count on yourself or an appraiser and even they make mistakes. Coins are an area where you can easily get burned on but you can spend years as I have and feel fairly confident in any coin transaction. You can however buy silver coins and buy them based on their melt value. Just that the very old U. S. silver coins were 80 pecent pure and from the late 1800s they were 90 percent pure silver. The thing about coins is even during the recession they maintained there value and even went up in value. Get the black book on coin values if you want to get serious about coins. Toys have been with us for thousands of years but the fakes and reproductions have grown during the last century to far out number the real items. Cast iron toys were an 19th century to the early 20th century product made in great quantitys in America and a few other countries. For the most part the companies and employees took great pride in their work and it shows in the fit and finish they displayed. Most were made in two part molds and the real ones will fit together with little or no gapes showing. Sloppy fit is a telltel sign of a reproduction or a fake. And finish is to be expected to be faded on old pieces along with some indication it was played with at one time. Moving parts will show wear and paint will be missing some where. Look at protected areas for signs of old paint and you will have an idea of whether it has been repainted. No matter what you hear collectors will seldom pay a lot for a piece that has been restored. As a general rule restorations should be done on utliatarian pieces that are to be used or your own family pieces that you want to lok good. Collectors would rather have a piece that is original and in good condition. As a general rule I stay away from the cast iron banks as this is one of those areas that has more fakes than the real item. The problem with these is some are really well done. As with the cast toys look at the manufacturers markings. The fakes may be poorly marked or have the wrong marks or have some marks missing. In the last twenty years I have probably seen 100 fake banks and only a hand full of real ones. Push and pedal toys are still being made and restorations are plentiful. One of the keys is to look for wear as moving parts are going to show it and resent production will not. Ask to take a wheel off and look for wear on the axle from the wheel turnig. A original that was used at all will have wear. Also look for those hidden areas to detect a repainted item. If you come across one of the older rare pieces and it checks out think twice before you try restoring it. You may just loose half the value. We have a lot of ammeture restorers out

there and you will see it in sloppy work and you want to stay away from most of these. They can not be called original and to restore them the restorer will have to undo the mistakes made by the novice costing you extra money. There is a market out there for reproductions that are extremely well made ones. And even for forgeries believe it or not. That guy with the fancy car and house may want to have a picaso but can not afford it but he might want one of the well done fakes. This is all done on the up and up with every one being aware of just what they are buying. But you as a buyer or seller do not want to trade in copyrighted work as this will get you in lots of trouble and is not worth it. And your reputation should mean much more than the few extra dollars you would realize. If you buy stemware you will run across pieces that have had chips polished out of the rims or the base. These edges should be rounded and if they are flat they were probably repaired. Hold them up to a good natural light and look them over closely. The crystal pieces are easy to spot or I should say hear. Hold the stem by the base and tap the rim with your finger nail and you should hear a pleasant note that has a little hang time to it. If you hear a dull sound that falls quickly away it is not crystal. This test is also a good way to determine if a piece of pottery or porcelean has been repaired. Much of what you find will have something wrong with it. Tap it in the same manner and it should resonate for a second if not repaired. The broken piece does not let the sound travel through the whole piece as regardless of how well it was repaired the sound will stop when it hits the tiny crack or break even if you can not see it. Again natural light will show what artiffical light often will not. So much American pottery has been copied by so many high school art classes even though they are usually told to use their own ideas you will find pieces copied from art books Luckt for us they are almost always signed with the students name. American Indian pottery has been reproduced since the 1800s for the tourist trade and after it gets some age on it may be almost impossible to tell from some of the later family used pieces. I stick with buying my pieces from established sellers of Indian pottery and outside this I buy only when the price is good even if the piece is a reproduction. Some of the high end potteries had such unusual glazes that you can pick them out in a crowd by the glaze alone. Face jugs from the 1800s have been reproduced heavily and especially in the last twenty years. Expensive pottery is

one area that I almost always get a second opinion on. A book or two or more on vintage pottery would be advisable and with great pictures you may be able to inlist the help of an expert online. There will be some feature like the glaze or the form itself that draws your attention over other pieces and that is why they are so valuable today. Coins whether you are buying for the presious metal or for the collector value is an area where there are numerous fakes. What you would normally find as fakes go would be key and semi key coins. These are coins that had low mintage numbers compared to the regular production. Examples would be the silver Washington quarters of 1932. You can buy a highl grade quarter from the philly mint for aq resonable price but when it comes to the Denver and the San Francisco mints for the same year expect to pay hundreds of dollars for a nice lower grade coin. The mint markes from a San Francisco coin are actually cut from a quarter that is plentiful and glued or silver soildered onto a philly 1932 making it a 32s worth hundreds. A close look with a magnifying glass will show the fraud if used but many people have been fooled. Silver dollars are also one of the copied pieces you will find pretending they are something they are not. The mint made these coins by stamping a silver blank with tons of pressure. Fakes are often made from a real coin that has had a mold made of it and then silver is melted into the mold to make a copy. This molding process causes the cion to loose some of the sharpness of the lettering of the real thing and shows easily under magnification. Base metal cions of low value base metals have been molded and then plated with the correct surface metal like silver or gold. All cions minted by the U.S. Mint have strict weight, size and metal requirements. You can sot the fakes with a magnet if the use magnetic metals as a base. Silver and gold will not be attracted by a magnet. The most famous fake that spawned a well known saying was not a molded coin but a nickle that the U.S. Mint made without using the word cents on it. With the gold strick in California and in Alaska all of a sudden it was not rare to find a gold coin being used to make transactions in any store. A fellow named Josh took one of these nickles and plated it with gold and ed them as five dollar gold pieces. His cost would have been less than ten cents, a good profit in any bodies book. We now have the saying, just joshing because of this. At around the same period of time, just a decade earlier the world traded with silver being the preferred coinage. If you were an importer you would have sent U.S. Trade dollars made

of one once of silver. Other countries had Crowns like England, Japan and China. Recently a bunch of fake trade dollars have come into the country from China. They are for the most part fake Japanese and Chinese silver crowns. They are mold made but the weight is way off and that is the easy way to tell. Some of the original coins in certain years can sell for a thousand dollars or more. I have paid 1200 dollars for a U.S. minted dime so you can simply look to see the most expensive U.S. coins and you will have a near complete list of coins to check closely before spending your money. While I am at it I will cover the coins you see on TV every time you look. These are nonmonetary which really means of no value which is what they are. They will never become collectable and they are clad in less than one cent of precious metal so they fail on that point also. You also have the real coins that are plated in gold to make them sellable. They have value whenever you want a soda or a candy bar and that is about it. They should be illegal to sell as so many people have wasted their hard earned money on something that will never go up in value but so much for the American business ethnic, anything for a buck. Furniture is something that has been faked and reproduced for a long time. Unless you have a lot of storage space you will probably not buy it for resale. I buy it to replace pieces in my home with quality in mind. I have from time to time bought a piece to resell when the price was right. Furniture has taken a big hit price wise with only the rare early pieces retaining their value. When it comes to furniture you have what I call put up pieces, reproductions, and mis represented pieces. I deal with mainly American made pieces as that is a rich heritage of fine craftsman that we can be proud of. We have furniture from all over but besides American pieces you are likely to find some English made pieces in fair numbers. What we started with in America was something they were running out of in Europe and that was old growth forests. Early pieces were often made up with table tops and chest tops made with a single wide board. This is one of the keys to look for in early American pieces and when you see more than one board tops or sides you are likely looking at late 1800s or later pieces. They also did not have the variety of finishing tools untill the early pieces bought about in the industrial age. There were foot powered lathes for turning spindles and even some water powered ones but they had do do a lot of finishing work by hand. You have to look closely but you can see high and low points where a hand plane was used and like pieces will not be perfect matches. You might have an arm on a chair that is a little narrower than its twin on the other side along with slightly

different diameters of spindles. You can use to your advantage measuring tools to spot some of these differences. Also the quality of the wood they used was such that they did not have to use boards with knots where it would be seen. You also had some of the fancy grains in woods like mahogany, walnut, and the curly maples such as shell flame, bird seye, and tiger stripe. As time went on these high quality woods began to become scarce and therefore expensive. Regional construction of furniture in the bigger shops would reflect the woods that grew in that particular region. Primary woods are the ones that are visible on the piece and secondary woods would be found on he inside of drawers and the backs of chests. In the north you would find pine as a secondary wood and walnuts and maples as primarys. States like Pennsylvania and Virginia would have some woods found in pieces of the south as well as the north. Pines of a different species and lots of popular were common. Oaks as primary were predominate in the south but also showed up in those border regions. Cherry is another of these woods that can be found from the mid Atlantic to the southern states. You may have noticed that I have not mentioned mahogany but it is not a native species but it was used in all of the shops of the famous makers of the day. Much of it was bought into ports from South America to ports in Boston and New York and all the way to New Orleans. Much of the better furniture of the day was bought buy wealthy customers and was special order and often consisted of groups of similar pieces. These in time would be split up and found just about anywhere the heirs to the estate lived. The early finishes were not what they are today. You will not or I should say should not find the high gloss finishes of today. The old finishes were made from various oils like linseed and others and were used to create hand rubbed finishes that were deep and lasted forever and even light scratches would barely show because the oil penetrated the wood and was not just on the surface. These finishes penetrated deeper into the wood and even today you can see the low luster sheen that seems to go down into the wood. If you see other than this finish the piece has either been refinished or it is not as old as you might think. The various varnishes came into vouge in the later part of the 1800s as did much more machine finishing. These finishes are noted for what is called alligatoring, this is where the finish as it oxidizes forms bumpsand little ridges in the finish. It is a shame that they did not stick with the old oil finishes. When it comes to hardware I am referring to drawer pulls, hinges and the metal fastners like nails of various types. The early crude hinges were made with nails

with one nail forming the pivot point of the hinge. These were common on blanket chests and were a result of a lake of supply of the proper fixtures. Early nails were hand make and square and the most famous were the rose head nails, called this as the top on each side was hammered on a slat thus looking like the petals of a rose. Large production made nails did not come into being untill the years after the civil war. Places to find the nails where they can be seen would be the backs of chests and the frames of other pieces. The early drawer pulls were cast brass aand cast in sand. The sand resulted in a rough finish but the front would be polished smooth and the back seldom was. A easy indication you are not looking at the original pulls is extra holes in the inside of the drawer front or if these are not present look for ghost images on the drawer front resulting from a different size pull being original to the piece. Also on early pieces the nuts and the screws for the pulls will look hand made with, nonuniform thread spacing and square nuts with the hole off center because they were hand made. Early pieces in unfinished areas will show saw kerf marks from where the board was cut from the log. Up untill the circular saws came into use kerf marks, the blades were bent in opposite directions to remove saw dust and keep from binding the blade, will show up as scratches running either across or up and down. The circular saw is just that a saw in the round and makes these scratches in circular patterns. These were seldom planed off on pieces of wood that were not going to be seen. Wear patterns on old pieces should be evident and come in different forms depending on the type of furniture. One would expect on dining room chairs that have been around for more than a hundred years to have some wear on the bottom of the legs from being moved or even rocked backwards and also the turned piece in front may have some wear from little shoes that figited nervously in antisapation of the evening meal. On heavy pieces and tall ones you might expect that at sometime one of the feet may have been broken in moving. Look for nail repairs where the old foot was repaired or a new one was attached. You may see mix matched types of wood where it should all be the same. Also changes in wood grain direction indicate replacement. On tall pieces even if you have to get on a step ladder look for holes on the top where missing finials once were. Not to many people will tell you to do this but try smelling the piece. A recently refinished piece will have a hint of the finishing medium was used. In oil finishes this will linger for quite some time. Wood is full of pores and chemical

compounds will penetrate these pores and rmain fairly fresh for some time. Water based finishe is hard to detect by smell but the finish itself will betray its modern roots. Like furniture I also smell guns for the modern chemical blueing being used to cover up wear to the finish, it is quite distictive. All I am trying to tell you is to go into each potential buy with all your senses working for you as any one of them or a combination may keep you from making a costly mistake. Few areas of the collecting world have cost people more money than fakes in the art world with millions spent on non original pieces. With the huge record breaking amounts being spent each year it is noo wander it draws so many fakes. I will not pretend to make you an art expert as I am not one myself but I will try to teach you how to know what to buy and what not to buy, The main categorys of art on canvass and board are acryilic, oil and water colors. The first one is a fairly modern medium and will show up florecent under a black light as it contains optical brighteners used to make the colors brighter. Modern oils will have them also but the medium is not water based but oil based. If you find a painting in oil that does not give off this reflective glow it is either an older painting or it is a very hard to do fake of the old methods. Really old oil paintings are often painted on actual boards or a single board and some on early fabrics or animal skins. Fabric covered paper and calcium carbonate board became popular in the twentith century as a backing for paint. These will often have the manufacturers information on them as well as some information from the painter. You can use the manufacturers information to determine the absolute oldest date the painting could be as the first year they made the board. Research is of great importance when it comes to art and there are hundreds of free and lots of sites which provide information. The problem with paintings is in the artist, some sign their work with a last name, a complete name, or no name at all. Some name the piece, date it and sign it in a legible manner. Some do not and leave you quessing as to their name. As a painter of no great import I do always sign my work legibly with first and last name. You should be getting the idea of how complicated it is to determine the facts of a single painting. And then we throw in water colors to add some more difficulty. Water colors are most often found painted on paper and contrast highly when compared to an oil painting made up of heavy layers of oil paint. Very early paper was made of animal skins and then it progressed to paper made from the threads of cloth much as our paper money still it. And modern water color paper is made from wood fibers pressed into a sheet.

Now here is the easist way to tell if what you are looking at is a print or an artist created piece. Modern printing methods are in a way similar to TV. The TV creates an image with different colored pixels. Printing uses tiny dots of color in much the same way and these can be seen with very good eyes or a magnifying glass. Try a newspaper as this is the most visible of the printing methods using dots of color. An artist uses brush strokes or a painting knife with uniterupted medium. I am not dismissing artists who use printing as a medium but instead showing you a quick way to tell the difference. There are noted pieces of art that were printed by some of the masters but these were done on engraved plates with continuos lines of color making up the image. Thousands of prints are sold as art work that was originally done in one of the three mediums because people do not know how to tell the difference. The backing medium is the first indication that it is probably not a painting. If it is not on board or on canvass but instead is backed by paper you probably have a print. If those tiny little dots show up you know you have a print. Colors, or the number of colors is also an indication. Paintings can have any number of colors and even the same basic color can vary in its brightness or gloss. The most complicated of printing presses are only six color ones. You may think this is all cut and dried but painting methods can almost look like prints and printing presses can come close to a painting. A painting that carries A signature when viewed at a low angle will look as if it is raised above the paint layer below it. A print that has a printed signature will be in the same plane as the printing. This is also how you tell whether a print is signed as it will have some visible height above the printed layer. Prints can be aged to some degree by the paper used. Early printed mediums most in the early1900s was printed on light weight paper which was cheaper to use. Heavy paper prints are ones that were meant to last like a artists limited addition series of prints. The early prints were often engravings or lithographs and the lithographs unlike todays were cut by the artist into stone. These stone lithographs will show a fairly distinct line where the paper all around the edges is not crushed. This was the result of the paper being slightly larger than the stone. The press put huge downward pressure on the paper and actually crushed the paper where the image was created. The engraved printing plate of the 15 and 16 hundreds was usually copper and the artist cut the images he wanted to depict into the copper. The first printing would show little ink lines often running in a different direction from the engraved line and were caused by little copper burrs from the first cutting of the image. These would wear off rather quickly showing what the artist meant to

portray. Contrary to what you might think you want to find the first printing and one that shows these little imperfections. These are the most valuable of all as they are near the first. Years later the plate may have been bought out the lines touched up by the artist or someone else. These will show slightly wider lines of print as touching up the engraving meant recutting it and this widened the grooves. I have bought paintings that have obviously been re framed and in most instances this is not good. Frames even of the same size will vary and when the painting is reset into the frame new edges of the canvass might show. This can be distinctive if the painting needs cleaning or the old exposed colors have faded but not where they were covered by the old frame. People want the frame the artist used when he finished his painting even if it looks to be dated or quite plane. So many paintings have lost some of their value because someone decided the painting needed a fancy frame. It is a coomon thing to find and it can greatly effect the value downward when it is done. Your chances of selling modern prints goes down as the number of prints goes up. The last limited print I bought and sold was one of twenty and dated to the great depression. The artist had little money and twenty was probably all she could afford as she was living at Carnegie hall as a lot of artist were during the great depression. Of the twenty only a few still survived. That is a component in buying art as over time some examples will be lost or destroyed making those left that much more valuable. After selling my one of twenty I regretted it. Today we have limited addition prints that number in the multiples of a thousand and if they want a new limited addition they can change just the size of the print and call it a new limited addition. And no I do not agree with this but the only way to change it is to vote with your pocket book and not buy the prints. An area I have not discussed is that of new artists and naive artists. I collect both but you have no way of knowing who might become famous. Grand Ma Moses comes to mind and she started painting in her later years and was not famous for years selling paintings for a little money that are now worth tens of thousands. I buy what I like and all genres of art and as long as I like it that is ok. If it becomes valuable in the future so be it. Also good local artists will have a following in your area, they just may never command high prices. Just a warning to those who think a three or even five day inspection period is ok. I have for the most part offered a fourteen day inspection period with money back regardless the reason. This allows the buyer in this busy world plenty of

time to have a second opinion on their perchase. When you are selling quality items and real antiques you seldom see returns on them. Often the buyer has been looking for that particular item for a long time. And being lenient with customers is appreciated and they tell other people about you.

Chapter 5

Frauds, Fakes and repos

Imagine waking up and finding out you sold four or five hundred dollars worth of chandic Inventory while you slept. That does not happen with a small town shop or selling out of your home locally. When I ran my businesses in the 80s and 90s I sold at several venues to keep the volume of sales I wanted. I even started to ship overseas. Living in a small town I had to work hard at keeping local sales up by finding great deals for my customers but I was limited to what I sold by my customer base. As I watched the inter net grow in the nineties I knew I would have to make the change to online sales. I did and made some good profit on some items but it was a time in my life that I was taking multiple college subjects and having to devote more time to my full time job so I finally gave it up and closed down the buisness. I was out of the business but I was not out of buying and continued to do so. Finally I had to start getting rid of some of it and decided to just do online at first. From selling on a one to one basis to selling on the internet is like going from the pony express to email in a single day. Depending on the methods you decide to use you can see sales almost instantly. I have actually posted an item and before I go off the page sold it. And you must know I am more serious about collecting than I am selling and often buy more than I sell. I mentioned back in the beginning some of my sales on the net and the first one I the most was priced a little high for what I paid but it sold for two thousand three hundred percent profit. Things have calmed down a bit since we have gone through this recession as buyers are more likely to think about whether they need the item or not. Almost nothing I sell is something you need, just something you want, but besides this I sold a little over five thousand dollars in two months this winter. This was no doubt the result of people buying what they wanted for Christmas but did not get. But with the inte rnet you have millions of potential buyers who are on the net from a few hours to many hours a day, all you have to do is have something listed where they can find it. I will attempt to give you a good start and show you how to list, how to photograph, and how to describe your items. Also and often more important is to

avoid the millions of crooks and scam artists that inhabit the web. Your options on where to sell are numerous and I will give you some to start you off. You will of course need a computer and hopefully you will have a backup for when you will need it! A digital camera of high resolution and variable power lense is the best to start off with. I got by on this for a long time and to do extreme close ups I held one of the cheap jewlery loopes in front of the camera lens with it set on its highest setting. This worked good for any small writing or intricate items like jewelry where you want to show detail. For your memory cards you will want to keep your personal ones separate from your buisness ones. I just put a big b in felt tip pen on my memory cards to keep them separate. Having all those buyers tools is also a good idea for the seller as customers are going to ask you how big it is, how much it weighs and so on. I keep a written record and a backup of my hard drive so I always have the records I need. You can probably get by without the written stuff just back up your files. It matters not how well you describe an item as there will be those who will ask you additional questions anyway. You still have to describe it really well to keep from getting a hundred questions a day. They will want to know where it came from, how tall is it, how wide and is it vintage or antique. Your objective is to describe it so well that few questions will be emailed and so well that the buyer will want to get it right away. I always add the history of an item of importance even if it takes a long paragraph or two. I only do this if I know it and please do not make something up. Your description is also a way the customer sizes you up, seeing how much you know. You will have those who know more or think they know more than you. This can be iritating but realize this some after a polite reply will buy the item. I always thank them for the information they provided me and as I have determined from their reaction to my reply, this polite reply does not always happen. Always put yourself in the customers shoes and look at the transaction as they would and you will end up with some very satisfied customers who will tell others of their experience. Your pictures should be clear and cover the object from all angles. Any markings from an artist or a manufacturer should be pictured. If there are any defects they should be covered in your photos so that the buyer can not say you did not show them. For small items I picture something else in the photo to give a compaqrison to size. Jewelry is one of these that people want to be able to visualize its size so I put a coin in the photo to show them the size. Specify as to your shipping methods and whether you will ship any way the customer wants.

This is where you need accurate weights and be aware that odd size boxes may carry addition charges that you must specify. I found this out when I sold my deep sea fishing rig, and it was the hard way which I do not like. When I talk about shipping I am talking about something which can eat into your profits in a big way. First you have to decide what shipper you want to use. I chose the United States Postal Service and have been pleased with them so far. Their if it fits it ships program will cover most shipping applications. Even their little box has been right for me about 60 percent of the time and the others I usually ship their economy class mail which is about as cheap as it gets. They will ship worldwide if you decide to go that route as well as domestic sales. As I mentioned earlier I seldom buy shipping supplies except for tape, and on that always buy the good stuff. On big heavy boxes I use a good quality duct tape. A major super center sells a cheap knock off of duct tape but it is no good so spend a few more bucks. Besides tape you will need labels and packing materials along with a variety of boxes. I hit the dumpster beside one of two dollar stores. They seem to have some heavy weight boxes made a little stronger than the average. As well as boxes they often have the packing materials I need. I also frequent my favorite grocery store as they seem to have a lot of packing materials as well as some super heavy duty boxes. They get grapes in two piece foam boxes and these can be cut up to form padding for almost any item and it is free. There meat and sea food boxes are heavy weight and have an attached lid that makes for a secure package. I will not mention them by name but it is like a large predator on the plains of Africa. For those really expensive items I will wrap them in a plastic bag and then shoot some of that expanding foam used to insulate homes into the box. You have to wrap it in plastic because it will really stick to anything. Inside the box explain to the customer how you used the foam so they can remove it without breaking anything. On the matter of insurance I will leave that up to you, as I said I have had no problems with the USPS priority mail but items over 50 dollars I still put insurance on it. Always use enough tape because if you count on one strip of tape to hold and it breaks you have a problem that will cost you much more than another two foot of tape. Lets talk about where you want to sell to get the most bang for your buck as that is what you need. I use all kinds of listings from free to paid auction sites and have had good results. You can simply go online and type in search for free classifieds or auction sites and you will have a long list of possibilities to choose

from. I even use Graigs list for some close to home sales but you have to be carefull. Insist on cash and meet the person in a public place not your home. You will get all kinds of con mens e mails and most will want to send you a noncash method of payment and a shipping service will pick up the package. They often say they are buying for a third party and you might see some poor english in their email. What happens is the send you a check or money order printed on their printer and the shipper has already picked up the package long before you find out e payment was forged. I simply delete these e mails and go about my business but every once in a while I have a little fun with them. I email them back and tell them that the U.S. is cracking down on fraud from other countries and the NSA tracks their e mail back to its owner and then a tomahawk warhead is directed to their location. It is just my way of saying thanks for inquiring about my listing. People who are out to rip you off probably number as many as the honest customers. I insists on cash for one on one sales and the others I use a secured payment system like paypal. Anything else and you might get ripped off and I have know people who have itted to loosing thousands of dollars to con men on the net. You will still have e mails from real customers and you need to give them the attention they deserve. Answering e mails quickly makes your customers aware that you care enough to do so. On the buying side I have had e mails answered in days instead of a day and I have had them not answered at all. Needless to say few of these get my business and that is a lesson for all sellers. I get comments about how quickly I answer questions and this tells me it is important to my customers. You must always that you are not face to face with your customer and they can not get feed back from your demeanor over the net. You have to put them at ease with your replys to their questions. No it is not always easy but I answer each question each night except Sundays and the time our power went out for a week. That is answers for three e mail s and I have had as many as five. This is an area where you can get a leg up on some of your competion. Even though I may never see the person I try to form some kind of personal relationship that keeps them coming back to me instead of searching out others. Now as to sealing the deal without making the customer feel you are pressuring them you must use a little subtle hint. When I am asked a question about one of my listings I will in my replay mention that I have had several others ask the same question. This plants a little bug that will tell them that if they do not buy it someone else may be getting ready to click buy at that very moment. I have had

them within moments of my e mailed reply e mail me that they just bought it. You just do not argue with what works even if it takes a little more effort. I just did this very same thing last night and sold the item for a 680 percent profit before shipping. You can sell all year and twenty four hours a day but there are certain times in which you need to list as many things as you can to take advantage of the moment. I am talking about those peak selling periods, Christmas, tax returns, mothers day, fathers, all the gift giving and self rewarding times of year that people feel the erge to hit the key pad in search of bliss. Do not get me wrong, Christmas is great but, tax return time is when the really big items are often bought. It is a time of seemingly free money to those who get a return and they will buy that special piece they save for but never manage not to spend it on every day things. The big ticket item is now and only now within their budget and if you do not have your listings jamb packed as full as you can get them you will miss out on some of the best sells you have ever seen. Even though just about all collectable have fallen off in what is being paid the peak times will bring out the people who do not surf the web to find all the best deals and spend hours a day doing so. You will get the person who sees what they want and clicks on the buy curser without looking elsewhere to find it cheaper. This is the period in which I bump my prices up a little and make sure I have all my best inventory listed. These sale periods make up for the slack times that hit shortly after the good times. Can you make a living by selling on the net? Yes but, you would have to work very hard both finding things to sell at a profit and work almost as hard selling them. Some people can do it and some can not. I prefer to add to my income when I want to and kick back and paint, collect, and write books nowing that I have an almost instant source of income at the click when I need or want it. It is all a matter of how hard you want to work and how much time you can devote to it. It is not a get rich fast like they tell you in buying real estate which can put you in the poor house if you do not know exactly what you are doing but it is a way to grow your wealth while having fun doing so. It is a great way for a collector to add to his or her collections by selling the bulk of what you buy and keeping the occasional great piece you find for your collection, which also by the way adds to your net worth. If you are like me or find yourself becoming like me it will not be work at all but a full filling and rewarding way to fill your days.

These photos represent just a tiny fracion of the pieces I have found and put into my collection or sold. From the historic to the sublime feeling you are looking at a piece of art, all hold a special place in my memories. These beautiful pieces that man created help to define us. Nearly every house hold in America holds something like them whether it is a wealthy house hold or a poor one we are drawn to them and consider them treasures Most of us who love to learn all we see about them are real lovers of history whether the piece was made in America or half way around the world. Finding out all we can about each piece is what defines us as collectors. Please enjoy!

The preceding photos are but a tiny fraction of the ones I have taken of my collection. Regardless of whether you will collect or sell they are important. Early on I simply displayed everything but after breaking a rare Flow Blue cheese dish I started to box everything I could with packing material for protection. This is good practice if you will be shipping as well because things will get dropped. Along with about four inches of packing to absorb shock I would affix one photo of the item on the outside where I could see it easily. And here is the reason why! Several years back an older collector I knew decided it was time to liquidate his collection. He had done as I in packing and boxing up his pieces. Unlike me he had not even put a descriptive on the outside of the box. He had counted on his memory and at his advanced age and poor health he now had a huge collection of boxes for which he had little idea what was in them. Early on I just wrote a descriptive on the outside of the box but realized this was not a good method when I decided to sell a piece that another collector had begged me to sell her and found that I still had to spend hours looking for the box. That picture on the box is golden and should always be done. Pictures being worth a thousand words are true, your eye will notice the picture quickly and your brain will make the connection as to what it is in milliseconds. that in most instances time is money and the faster you can get it done the better. Also when collecting you will end up collecting exact or very close copies of say pottery and having that picture tells you you have a blood red Rookwood vase instead of a forest green one. Now back to my collector friend and his sticky situation. H had called some auctioneers and few wanted to go through all the extra work without charging a high commission. He ended up settling on one who talked him into simply having a boxed auction. They would be opened as they came to the gavel with a few opened for a slight advance look see. This was a real problem for any collector and was not even good for the occasional collector. The collector wants to know that he will have the chance to buy that piece he is looking for, not a long odds chance something he wants will come up. They do not like to spend all day at an auction only to find that nothing was presented that blew their proverbial skirt up. You can probably guess how it turned out but here goes. Even I did not attend because I was at an auction that had things listed that I wanted. I heard that few collectors showed up and of the bidders most were what I call box lot buyers. Buyers who buy a lot and only get a few pieces of even minimum value. These box lotters walked away with some nice pieces and at

very low prices. The auctioneer still got his commission and did not have to do a lot of work for it. It was a long drive to boot and that hurt things because it was out in the middle of nowhere. Likely tens of thousands or less was not realized making a long career of collecting almost pointless. This has two lessons of importance and that is; one, take the time to properly label and box your best pieces so that no matter who is charged with getting full value for them they will have a picture on the box and yes a value affixed to the picture for that item. Second, pick carefully who will sell your precious items whether you are there or make arrangements for when you are no longer among the living. I have it all spelled out in a giant ledger in legal with a copy of those put away in a safe. I have bought many fine pieces for very low prices because someone else has not done the planning or the preparation I do with every piece I buy. This is often where I get those one thousand to two thousand percent profits. And as a cheapy yes you can often use cheap printer paper instead of photo paper.

Prologue

Chances are good that you will not find all the great pieces I have found in four decades but that does not mean that you will not find pieces of equal beauty and value. You hear the stories and yes many are true like the guy who went to his local thrift store and found a rolled up copy of the Declaration of Independence and only paid a few dollars for it. Copy it was but it was one of the early copies that were made to show the public just what was in it. They are quite rare and this guy made several years wages in just a few minutes in a thrift shop. Then there was the painting worth several million dollars that was set out with the garbage on a New York street and picked up by someone with a keen eye for such things. People can and will always set things out for the landfill that are worth a lot of money. It is simple really, an old Federal Period chair that has been around forever has loosened up to where it is not safe to set on and the owner attaches no special value to it and discards it like it were any old chair. My best find ever was an incidental find, an accident. I bought an old piece of English furniture and in it was something worth hundreds of times the value of the furniture. Your chances are better than playing the lottery. It will for me always be the finding and buying and not the selling of a piece that I forever. Yes I can find a piece and then sell it for many times what I paid and that is a satisfying feeling also but it just does not push my buttons the way the hunt does. Even the research is a part of my memories when I find something I have seen while doing research. I can look at a picture in my computer and all the things that took place that day come flooding back to me. The where I found it, the when, and the where along with what I paid are as clear as if they just happened. As I was finishing up this handbook for collectors and sellers I sold a split bamboo fly rod I had purchased several years back. The fact that I had sold it for twenty times what I had paid was not even on my mind. It took me back to a side rod in the county where we often went to yard sales in the area. Having hit all the good one we were going back to town to have a late breakfast. I took a side road to the main highway because something told me to. As I drove I saw an old repair garage by the side of the road with a young man removing things from inside. There was no sale sign but I stopped anyway. At first glance I saw some old fishing poles one with a brass reel and next to it a canvas fly rod case. I asked a few questions of the man and learned he was moving out of state for a

job. He was told if he cleaned up the garage and got rid of everything he a great could stay without paying his last month’s rent. Now I knew he was not attached to any of this and it was just a job to him. He said I was the only person who had stopped and he should have probably put out a sign but had not. My next words were what he wanted for what he had out front. All of it, not just one piece that might give it away. The price was so low I could hardly believe it but did manage to get the money out of my pocket. I knew that the brass reel alone was worth more than he little I paid and I could see the outline of three poles in the canvass case so off I went only to stop down the road to look in the case. A beautiful split bamboo fly rod came out one section at a time. Nothing was wrong with it but there was no fly reel, no problem as these rods are getting increasingly hard to find in any condition. Just about a month later I sold the brass reel and rod for twice what I pad for everything so now I had absolutely nothing in the rest of it. It is all as clear to me as if I were just stepping out of the car. How many people doing the same as my Wife and I had ed this place by without a second glance but given the time of morning it would have been quite a few. I always know the moment I buy something whether I will sell it it keep it ed on to my heirs. It is not always an easy decision as money earned from sales does allow me to keep collecting but it is a pact I made with myself and keeping ones word is a great virtue, one to be proud of. I broke this pact one time when a well known auctioneer saw one of my painting and talked me into cong it to him. From the moment I wished I had not done it and if I knew who bought I would probably try to buy it back. It was a sea scape painted by a family member of a famous Virginia family and one of my ions is regional artists who show artistic merit. I still have my memories of it and a few photos but that is all. Art became a second love of mine beside collecting coins. I am a novice at best who took an art appreciation course in college. Beside the beauty of art we have the history of man in the many varied art movements throughout the centuries. Art is one of the things that sets us apart from the rest of the animals. From a cave drawing in to the abstractionist of the mid 1900s we can all look at art as a way of mans constant attempts to define himself. I display about fifty pieces and look at them all the time and it is never tiring as each time I can see something a little different in them and perhaps in myself. I would be the first to say that collecting has changed me for the better over these many years not only learned our history but that of the rest of the world and that has reinforced the fact that we are all the same given a chance. We all want the same basic things for ourselves and our familys and with all the bad things we see ever day in the news we all like to see or hear about the good that mankind is capable of given the same opportunities. I wish you all the luck in the world

even though I think luck is something you make not something that is magically given to you.