The Lottery Disease in People Who Try to Sell Penny Stamps

 

Besides running this private charity, Kids Need Stamps 2, i help out in a number of various stamp discussion groups on Facebook. More times than not I come across a set of people who i must call "the lottery disease" mainly because the great majority of these people are convinced, through no research, that they have something rare and worth thousands or millions of dollars. One sad fellow was planning to fix his roof on the sale of a stamp that wouldn't even pay for the call to the roof company.

I don't mention this to mock anyone because initially these are common reactions from inexperienced people about basic stamps. Most people often publicly confess they haven't done any research or are overwhelmed by information overload. There are plenty of places on the internet where you can get reasonable information such as stampworld.com or theswedenishtiger.com. Also if you have a smart phone you can download stamp ID apps, most are free, take a photo and it can usually find them for you. 

What gets many of experienced helpers in this groups is the outright hostility and deliberate ignorance of many folks whom are supposed to be mature adults. At any given time you have access to over 250 years of stamp experience at your disposal in this groups -- all for free. In fact you have trust this experience because we wouldn't be still collectors, myself at 50 years, if we didn't love the hobby and want to see it survive the 21st century.

If you really want to hit the lottery, buy a lottery ticket. If you come across some stamps during these circumstances:

inherited from family

found in a new house bought

grabbed at a thrift store

chances are highly likely you have a collection of stamps worth less than $100. Stamping is a hobby of heart and soul about pieces of art and examples of history that thrill the collector. The great majority were printed in the tens of millions. Inexperience people mix up stamps with coins, unlike coins a stamp in good condition from 1897 is likely worth a $1 or less. Real monetary value in stamps is about rare stamps -- which there aren't many around, hence the term "rare" and a few here and there with an error on them and even some of these aren't worth much because some printers printed millions anywhere so the error now becomes common and not rare.

Ebay has been a shot in the arm to the stamp hobby. But it's merely a glorified garage sale. If someone is selling a 1c stamp for $10, experienced collectors will laugh and move on. Others might want to buy it. Overpricing in that platform among many resale platforms is common and no true indicator of actual "static" catalog value. So the following exchange in stamp groups is about as common as these penny stamps:

Inexperienced Stamp Seller: hey anyone know the value of this stamp?

Experienced Collector:  yes, its worth about 5c in good condition.

Inexperience Stamp Seller: but i just saw it for sale on Ebay for $15

Experienced Collector: that's not an indicator of value, that's just the price that person wants.

                                     Maybe if they sell it for $15, you can jump on Ebay and do the same.

                                     But my valuation of a nickel is all its honestly worth.

Inexperienced Stamp Seller: well you can go **bleep** and **bleep** yourself

That above is a common exchange between honest collectors often with years of collecting experience that exceed the life of the person asking the questions. Have fun and start collecting these stamps but please stop believing you are going to be rich overnight. And if you are prepared to curse a good hearted collector out, my advice is, spare us the long family history of these stamps passed down from four generations. We hear that a lot usually just before the person is mad because the stamps are worth less than a case of beer. Where you respect the work your past family put into these collections I cannot judge but i will say going into ruthless business mode and throwing tantrums because you don't like what you hear isn't a good way to honor their memory.

Stamps. 

Love them.

Collect them.

Donate them.

But if you sell them I am pretty sure that proceeds of that sale plus another $249,950 will help you buy a nice, three bedroom $250,000 house.

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