Slippery Slope

I consider myself a pretty frugal person even if I don't go out of my way to shop at yard sales. But since I joined the blogosphere, I've heard tales of wondrous yard sale and flea market finds. About two or three weekends ago, when the weather started turning nice, yard sales started popping up. Last weekend, we had snow flurries. In April. And I'm not up north, I'm in Virginia.

I'm going to be doing some yard work in the coming weeks that required some tools I didn't have. Before heading to Home Depot to buy them new, I decided to check Craigslist first. One of the first yard sales advertisements I came across was actually an estate sale. In the fine print of the listing, they mentioned sports collectibles.

Huh.

I didn't follow up on this one but I quickly became sidetracked and started searching for other people selling baseball cards. Slippery slope.

There were quite a few former collectors with overvalued junk wax or $100 "hits" that could be found in the $2 bin of the last card show.

I did stumble upon one that I thought was too good to be true that was listed two days before I saw it. There's no way this could be still be there, right?

Approximately 35,000 sports cards - baseball, football, basketball, hockey. Cash only - $50 OBO.

This is like an instant dime box starter kit. Times twelve. Yes, it is probably all junk wax, but to be honest, I've been looking at going back to put together runs of complete base sets anyway. As long as the cards were in good shape, this sounded like a steal for 35,000 cards, no matter the sets.

As you may know, I've been on a lot buying kick recently so I shot off an email asking if it was still available, assuming it had been snapped up already. But to my surprise, I got an almost instant reply saying they were still there.

Slippery slope.

I made arrangements to stop by on Saturday morning to take a look. I took the lids off a couple and confirmed they were all in decent condition and mostly full like the pictures showed. And the boxes themselves are in great shape too. There were also a couple of 800 count boxes that weren't pictured so I didn't bother trying to haggle the price down any further. If the 35,000 count is close to accurate, that's like 7 cards per penny.

I have a feeling these are pretty picked through as far as rookies and stars go but I will probably look at how close I am to completing some of the sets and break up the rest of the stuff into team lots. I haven't had the chance to go through any of them yet but I can tell you I have no interest in the football, basketball or hockey cards. Hopefully, they don't make up too much of the lot.

The other Cubs boxes are taking priority but I needed to throw this post out there to buy me some scanning and cropping time between posts. I might be able to get through the summer on these posts alone. I hope so anyway, because my hobby budget is now officially tapping out.