Just got the new issue and there were two letters that I wanted to comment on, one more than the other. The first, that I’m mostly going to mention in passing, was by Scott Zimmer, who said that “Many collectors view stamp investing as taboo”, which is true and, IMO, should be. It’s not taboo to invest in anything that you want, but you leave the realm of collecting and enter the realm of investing if you do that.
The second is from Robert Dragone, which i want to address in some more detail below the fold. Apparently, he doesn’t believe that people are in the hobby for reasons other than making money. Sorry pal, but most aren’t. That’s the whole point of having a hobby.
To get this out of the way up front, for me, a hobby is something that you do for personal enrichment and enjoyment, that you do in your spare time and with your spare money. It is not a job. It is not an investment. It is only done for fun.
A lot of people that I have run into recently seem to disagree. They are only collecting, or largely collecting, so they can sell their collection later in life for a huge cash infusion. That’s not to say that they’re wrong because that’s the thing about having a collection, no matter what you decide to collect. You get to decide why you do it and what outcome you hope to come to in the end.
It’s one reason I am so critical of the modern coin collecting marketplace because most for people, they seem only concerned with how much money they can make in the short or long term. They only care about the money, the coins are just a vehicle to get there. “I only care about the precious metals, screw the coins!” Their only interest in preservation goes so long as it preserves value, not historicity.
Now as I said, anyone can do anything for any reason they want and I am not going to be critical of it, unless it directly affects me or my enjoyment of the hobby. There is a strong desire among some people who really want everyone to be just like they are. There is a middle-ground where I can do my thing and you can do your thing and so long as no one is hurting anyone else, it shouldn’t matter. If you want to make a grand stamp collection, only so you can sell it in the end, that’s up to you. No harm, no foul, best of luck to you. That is not me.
However, that is not the impression I get from either letter. For Robert Dragone’s, he says “I call BS on that,” as if anyone who says they are collecting for the pure joy of it, they must be lying.
I suppose I can understand some of it, as a lot of the people who are pushing that the hardest tend to be very young collectors. When you have no money, that seems to drive a lot of what you do. It’s a modern thing because when I was young and had little money, I still collected and didn’t dream of selling any of them, I just set my sights a lot smaller and thought “someday, I’ll get those expensive stamps!”
I’m there now because I have worked my ass off my entire life and made the right decisions and now, I have plenty of money. Most things that I want, I can get. If I wanted to buy a new car today, I could pay cash without a moment’s notice. We have no debt and a credit rating above 800. That took a lot of work, but now we can reap the rewards of a lifetime of effort. It wasn’t always that way, but that’s why most collectors follow the path that we do. Start young, leave for a decade or two while we work hard, come back when we have plenty of disposable cash. I feel that most people who are money-hungry, they are either very young or fall into those decades where most of us weren’t collecting a lot. That’s not to say they’re wrong, but their view tends to be really, really skewed.
It wouldn’t be a big deal if they didn’t insist that everyone was just like they are. Dragone ends his letter with a suggestion that the APS needs to find a way to keep 17-30 year old collectors interested, as if it’s up to the APS to do so at all, but right there is the problem. Maybe those people need to be spending time getting their financial affairs in order first? I’m not one of those people who think that we should only appeal to old farts, that gets us into the problems that the hobby has today, but I also don’t think that we should appeal to investors. Back in the 90s, that’s what made the entire comic book market almost go under, because people only bought comics for the potential return on investment, not because they actually liked reading comics. That’s still going on today, with all of the absurd covers and terrible writing. They have lost the core of their audience and that’s why they are on the brink of failure.
That’s why we need to appeal to collectors, the people who are doing it just because they like doing it. How you define your collecting interests is entirely up to you, but the core of stamp collecting needs to be collecting. Not investing. Not speculating. Not this NFT nonsense. Collecting for no reason other than you get joy from doing so. Some of us can afford to buy more expensive stamps than others, but that time will come for you too if you’re living life right. You need to earn your way to that. It’s something to look forward to in your retirement.
Focusing only on the money, I think, is a recipe for disaster. We’ve seen what hobbies who do that come to and it isn’t pretty. If you are focused only on money, then I think it’s time for some introspection. Buckle down and improve yourself and your future outlook and the money becomes largely irrelevant. Live within your means until your means don’t matter. It’s the only way to get you where you want to go and in so doing, you won’t bring a hobby down around your ears with you. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?
