What's it worth to you?

What's it worth?

This is the question I am asked most often.  An understandable question, but I dislike it.

I've been an auctioneer and appraiser for about a dozen years and have been messing about with antiques for another half-decade more than that.  When I am asked the "question" the honest answer is "I don't know."

Sure I can sometimes come up with a ballpark figure, but that is about it.  What all these years of auctioneering has taught me is that something is worth what someone is willing to pay for it...nothing more and nothing less.  Forget guide books, appraisals and Antiques Roadshow.  If someone tells you your mother's old rocker is worth $500, they had better have their checkbook out, otherwise that statement of opinion isn't worth anything.  Truth is, I could look you right in the eye and tell you a discarded egg carton is worth twenty bucks, but if I'm not willing to hand over a crisp Jackson, my words are meaningless.

It makes perfect sense that a potential seller wants to have an idea what sorts of numbers to expect after an auction.  Will it be beans or filet mignon while out to dinner?  I really don't know until we have all those bodies in the gallery, wallets open, ready to spend.  To mention specific numbers is professional suicide.  If I say 100 and the market says 60, I look like crap.  You can't argue with the market.  Still, I am prodded and poked, my facial expressions watched closely for a hint.  "I don't want to give it away now" barks my potential client. "I don't want to give it away either" I retort.  My earnings are tied to my ability to sell an item.  The more money I can pry from a bidder's hands, the more money I make, but I can't make miracles when the market scoffs at an item.

During this process it becomes easy to determine if a seller is too emotionally attached to his or her belongings.  If someone is too enamored with stuff, I will never deliver a number that is big enough to satisfy the client.  We could have 300 bidders and fetch record breaking prices and I'll get responses like "It had to be worth more than that. My sister's husband's brother's cousin offered me (insert ridiculous number here) for it ten years ago. I guess you just don't get the right people at your auctions."  Somewhere out there is a legion of folks, their pockets stuffed with money running around the country offering random people greatly inflated prices for their junk.  They make their offers and then they're gone...like the wind.  By the time I show up, this magical buyer who by the way was ALWAYS turned down, is no longer available to make a purchase.  "Oh, he moved."  "Well, she died in '97." Always something.

After years of this sort of thing, I realized that when you want to sell something, just sell it.  Don't look back.  Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose.  If you got to use it and enjoy it, don't expect to get more than you paid for it...or even half.  I know people who have been dragging around heavy assets for years trying to get the very best price.  They're sure they've got something special and nobody seems to recognize it.  One day, the right person will come along and....Yeah, OK.  Tell your family to dig an extra big hole when you die so they can toss in all your beloved items.  Maybe someone will pay what you want in the afterlife.

This week, some more of my (now former) possessions found new homes.  Some sold for great prices, some didn't, but it doesn't matter.  In the end, it all evens out.  The windfalls usually negate the disappointments and it all works out.  eBay and Craigslist have huge audiences and you'll know fairly quickly if you've priced something too high.  You might get inquiries, but nobody will be serious.  Ignore what others are asking for similar items.  What matters is the price that something SOLD for.

During these last couple of years as I have made my physical load smaller, I have sold items at at my own auctions, some on eBay, and a few on Craigslist.  I have never waited more than a week to get an item sold.  If I got no responses, the price came down.  If I sold at auction, there was no minimum.  Each time money changed hands, I have felt freer, less weighed down.  It's hard to put a price on that. Surprisingly, the dollars have added up to a not-so-insignificant amount.  Over the last year the tally has topped five figures, often coming $50 or $100 at a time.  That's how much stuff I used to own and I didn't consider myself to be a packrat.  Far from it.  So here I am, all those dollars later, even happier than I was when I owned and toted around all those things.

Surprisingly,  I actually have very little left to sell...I only have some necessities and a few of the things I truly love.  There's little to worry about.  If someone broke into my place and stole everything, I'd be able to replace the majority of it in a week.  I don't need insurance riders anymore.  Now the new challenge will be to maintain a life with less material things.  There will be temptation and I will occasionally cave but I'm ready to ignore the calls to materialism and start living.  Look around....are you?

What's more important?  Going home without all the stuff or loading it up, taking it home and dragging it into the garage because you couldn't get a few extra bucks?

Putting it into Practice

Geez....a month to the day since my last post.  An awful lot has happened.  Without getting into detail, there has been a great deal of last minute change, not the least of which involves my relocating to a smaller dwelling.  I sit in my new space as I type, running over the events of the past few weeks.  Interesting is that I have had to put into practice all those words about material possessions I've been writing.  It has been a fascinating exercise to say the least.  I've finally been forced to live by my own words.  That's not a bad thing.

With the recent changes, I decided that perhaps I should write more about my own experiences as they relate to the things I own, or perhaps what I may decide to not own at some indefinite point in the future.

Before the move I had to assess what was coming and what wasn't.  Some of that process centered around the sheer bulk of an item.  Considering that I move a lot of heavy things for a living and often utter expletives while trying to manipulate  non-geometric, unevenly weighted monstrosities down winding stairways and narrow openings, I wasn't about to swear at my own idiocy while grimacing under an object with the approximate mass of a Volkswagen that I happened to own and couldn't leave behind.  That said, I decided I would take no more than 4 or 5 "large" pieces.  The others needed to go.

First out the door to someone else's home was my monolithic grandfather clock.  Although I loved the grand piece, I rarely wound it and actually took great pleasure watching someone else wheezing under its great weight.  In many ways, watching it go was cathartic.  I no longer actively collect clocks and it was time to let a bunch of them go to new homes.  In the end I took five with me, two of which were no larger than a cigar box.  The five would be my remaining connection to my collecting days and all functioned well enough to be wound and used regularly.

As for the furniture...everything needed a purpose.  Nothing could be sentimental or merely decorative.  The heaviest piece chosen was a tall Mission bookcase which could serve a variety of storage purposes since I was would be living in a pre Civil War home that had little storage.  Although heavy, it was narrow and would not have to be manipulated through doors.  To deal with seating, I toted in a European design sofa and a chair and to hold my TV, there would be a need for the low slung cabinet on which it had been sitting.  My office desk was the most irritating of the pieces in that it needed to be disassembled into pieces in order to get it out of my old office.  Every time we thought it would go out the door, a new appendage would jam against a wall or door frame and out would come the screwdriver to amputate it.  Everything else could be moved solo or packed in a box.  This was going to be a minimalist move no matter what.

It was now time to whittle back everything else so that a couple of trips with the pickup would be all that was required to finish the job....more on that later.

I'll MAKE it fit.