Chiming in 2-cents’ worth, just for the heck of it.
I have been into collecting and selling custom knives long enough to see some of the up’s and down’s you fellows mention.
One of the biggest problems I see for the collector who also wants to eventually get his money out (whether when he is still upright or in his estate) is the cost of selling.
The cost of selling can be high:
• You might have noticed how eBay + PayPal fees increasingly eat away at your net when you sell through them. It is not uncommon for eBay + PayPal to make more net on a sale than the consignor—the consignor can lose money while the online operations still make theirs.
• You might also be aware of the increased costs to rent tables at shows and for the travel expenses to attend those shows.
A seller needs to take these costs into account, unless he is indifferent to the cost of an item and whether he ever recovers the investment.
Only when there is a bull market on Randalls (or whatever you are selling) can you expect to make enough to cover the cost of selling and at least get your original cost out of a knife.
The best deal cost-wise is to list them on the Forum, but traffic here is light and we see how knives don’t always sell and sellers reduce asking prices just to move them.
If you leave your knives in your estate, the best way to move them post mortem is to leave them to a named person who appreciates them. If you have a lawyer or most other executors sell them, they are more interested in moving the inventory and closing out the paperwork than in maximizing the money they might conserve to the estate.
Barring that—at least have your wife or whoever you trust know what you have, where the knives are stored, where the inventory record is kept, what they cost, maybe how they can sell them, etc. Why? So the wife or whoever does not put them in a garage sale or take them to a flea market. (I might have mentioned in a previous post how a widow lady took her husband’s Loveless knives to a flea market and sold them for a couple hundred dollars each after having given away at least one to a family friend.)
By the way, when you do die and leave all this “stuff” for somebody to figure out and dispose of, your executor really does need to take into account what each item cost because in figuring the net worth of the estate they will take the Cost from the Sold Price, and look for the net value that accrues to the estate. I know of cases where families spent long days trying to discover records of purchases so they could establish the Cost Basis for the deceased’s collectibles. A good tax professional knows more about this than I do.
However, since I might actually sell a knife now and then and pay taxes on any profit, I record the Total Cost for acquiring each one. That includes Mileage associated with going to wherever I buy it, Postage involved in getting it delivered to me, Extras like Customer Wood, and so forth. You might be surprised how fast the Total Cost can go up when you keep track of each such expense.
For Randall folks, “catalogue price” is only a starting point when you consider the options we often want on a knife, so just looking at the Model Number and its Price in the catalogue won’t tell people later what you paid for the knife. Best to keep the Invoice that comes with each knife. Although I keep a spreadsheet with this information, one way to simplify it would be to make notations about non-invoiced expenses on the Shop Invoice and then put that into your records.
Enough already…Enjoy your Randalls!
Edited by LarryWW1246 (02/10/16 09:17 PM)
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Larry W. Williams
RKCC #CM-041
ABKA #046
RKS #1246
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