One day last October I woke up and realized I was in a mess. A lifestyle mess, a financial mess and a literal mess. After taking a hard look at my situation, I realized I was just in a horrible pattern of purchasing things I didn't need and had been for a long time. It was then I decided to make a change.
The first thing I did was take my finances into account. I realized I was spending way too much and getting no where near the value in return. One of my biggest expenditures was purchasing comic books each month. I have been collecting comic books for almost 10 years and have been spending on average $30 a month. That is a total of $3600.00!! If I were to invest that in the stock market and make a 10% yield over that time I would be sitting on just shy of $4000.00. Once I realized that, I stopped spending money on monthly comics.
While you think this would have illuminated the light bulb, it didn't. A few years ago I tried to sell off half of my collection and made about $0.45 for every dollar spent. Comics these days go for $3.99 an issue.... I am sure you can do the math yourself. But for those who cannot, that means that the $3600.00 in comics purchased are only worth about $1620.00 at the end of the day. Now, I have a couple issues that I purchased for cover over the years and are now worth well over that. But there are only a handful of those compared to the boxes of issues that are hardly worth the paper and ink that were used to publish them. Unfortunately these few issues do not make up for worthless ones.
I have to conclude this by saying I LOVE comic books. Collecting them, reading them, searching for the missing issue and finding it at a great price. To me, those things hold the value in collecting comics. But when I look beyond that and focus on the monetary returns and see how my bank account is scant month after month, it just doesn't make sense. Plus if I am not buying new ones, maybe I can finally find the time to read my old ones.