When I was younger, Id see my brother collect baseball cards with stated worths of X amount of dollars. Then, hed bring me to baseball card & sportsmans expositions at the Massena Arena. Hed walk around to the different kiosks inside looking for the right buyer. Id largely look around at the kitsch handicrafts -- stuff like a magazine clipping of a bald eagle glued to the face of a cross-section of wood and polyurethaned. Price? 10 dollars. Or a coin collectors wares, where Id assign my own worth to the coins based on their color and artistic representations. (I always loved the way the Persians stylized their historical figures with beards whose curls were of uniform shape and size.) Despite his trekking around, none wanted to offer my brother more than half of the recorded value of his mint condition Nolan Ryan card (among others). Wed come home, and hed offer his thoughts to me: No one wants to give me what the card is worth because they think Im just a stupid kid and that they can get one over on me. Since then, Ive had a largely skeptical eye on the supposed (and amorphous) value of intangibles. Maybe, in the baseball card sense, the perceived value wasnt so much about my brothers age so much as it was a buyers speculation as to the future of the market and the career of the player. At that time, it seemed it was better to believe that the card was worth 800 dollars, than to cash it in for a mere 400. And so this happens, and essentially government is telling you indirectly what it values. Id like to think that it really doesnt mean that much, but I already know enough people that are in their 70s and forced back to work because they trusted their retirement money to Merrill Lynch (and the likes) and, they lost it all. Maybe the safest place for some retirement funds is back between the mattresses. And hopefully youre doing something you love deeply, because some might need to be doing it until the day they die. youtu.be/5BLLEbYMncM
Posted on: Mon, 05 Jan 2015 20:13:44 +0000
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