Baseball cards
When I was a kid I began collecting baseball cards. As I got a little older, I began to like football cards and basketball cards and began trading cards with all my friends. We didn't really know that there was any value in the cards, we would just make trades based on the players that we liked. We would flip for them and I won quite a few cards from other people. When I reached my teens I no longer did anything with them, and just kept them in my closet in shoeboxes. I had about 10 shoeboxes full of cards and when I was leaving to go away to college, I was going through all my stuff and came across them. I was amazed when a friend told me that they may be worth money, and so I went online to research about rare trading cards.
I actually found out that there is a whole market out there for selling sports memorabilia. I never really had thought of them as much more than a childhood memory before this, but now in my adult life, they actually could serve a purpose. I started looking and realized that a lot of the cards that I had were actually worth good money.
I wasn't sure if I should part with them now, I mean I really did need the money. They could be worth more in the future if I saved them, after all most of my cards were in very good shape, a few not so good. I decided to really take the time and research each individual card and found out that there were several cards that were actually worth upwards of $100 and 2 that were worth almost $500 a piece. I decided that these would be the ones I would sell and I would save the rest of my collection for a rainy day. I wasn't really sure how to go about selling them. I went to a local place, but they weren't offering me near the amount that I was seeing these cards for online, so I decided to try and sell online.
I found a website that allows you to auction off merchandise and decided to get on there and try to sell these cards. I called it a sports auction and ran the group of them together and took $1200 for the 7 cards I had! I could not believe my eyes!