HOW TO MAKE MONEY EASILY III

Please note the new stuff I pulish will always feature at the top, the older stuff will be below this for new readers to catch up.

I will publish new items about once a week giving you hot tips on how make make that money.

How to make money with PAPER EPHEMERA

COMICS

Comics

This is a subject I know a fair bit about as I used to collect comics avidly.

A long time ago there used to be shops known as Second Hand Shops. These ere a superb source of back issues of comics and incredibly cheap at just 2 pence a comic irrespective of age, issue, rarity and condition. In the UK there was no real comic shops selling back issues. If you were lucky you could find mailing lists and send off for back issues from them but these outlets were few and far between. Most comics were given away to School Fetes, Jumble Sales or just thrown away to be pulped. The Second Hand Shops bought old comic collections for a halfpence each and resold them at 2p each. As a teenager the weekly trip to the Second Hand Shop was fantastic, some weeks there were no comics at all but once in a blue moon you found a couple of boxes of 1960's Silver Age Marvels and DC comics.

I used to collect Marvel rather than DC and thinking back at all the DC comics I passed up on I regret not buying them now. But of course as a teenager you have limited income from your pocket money(allowance) and any newspaper rounds you had. I had more disposable income than those who were too lazy to earn money so sometimes I can away with boxes full of comics and amassed a good collection alongside the issues I purchased new.

Like most people there comes a point that you think to yourself I do not read these now, I don't need them and I have no room for them (living at my parents it was impossible to store everything) so like most people I decided to sell them. Of course I regret it now. The Comic Dealer I sold to gave me what I thought was a fair price at the time £350 (enough to buy my first car so I could get a job). But that £350 then would translate into around £20000 had I kept the comics until now.

This is because comics are now fetching huge prices. With Superman's first appearance in Action Comics no 1 fetching £100, 000 in mint condition and Batman's first appearance in Detective Comics fetching about £75,000 in mint condition you can see how money is possible to be made.

The best sources for buying old comics cheaply are:

Local newspaper ads - I know one guy who buys lots of collections in my area. I tried this ad myself and was invited to purchase a couple of collections and ended up buying one of them.

Jumble Sales - it is still possible to find them on odd occasions.

Car Boot sales (Garage Sales) - people know they can get rid of large volumes of things they do not want at these places. They do not always know what value to put on them of course which is why you may turn up a gem or two at these events. I was talking recently to a man who bought a collection of Golden Age comics from a Car Boot (OK 10 years ago now) including a copy of Superman 3 and other early ones. All for the princely sum of about £100.

Beyond these venues people selling the comics tend to know what they may be worth and will be selling via the Internet or through a shop

Toys

Everyone had a favourite toy as a child. The older ones are perhaps or probably gone after being well loved and used and broken.

If you are lucky maybe you kept the broken toy, if you are luckier it never got broken, if you are fortunate maybe you will find another broken one that can help you repair yours to its original state.

So how do you find your toy?

A good start is of course Ebay but if it was popular you will end up paying the market value in the end unless everyone else who was after it is on holiday without Internet Access.

A much cheaper alternative but not as likely to be able to find that elusive item is a Car Boot sale, Garage Sale, local Auction House or local newspaper or fete.

On Sunday 30th September 2007 just 4 days ago as I write this I was at my regular car Boot Sale and came across a couple of string puppets of Batman & Robin. They were obviously old dating to around the late 60's but apart from a few broken strings (easily replaced) and Robin missing his feet (not easily replaced) they were an absolute steal at £6.

October 3rd and I have negotiated a sale of these to an American Collector for £430. So you get an idea of how easy it can be to make a quick profit from getting up early and knowing what collectors want to buy.

Making money part III

How to use what you already know to make money.

One of the quickest ways to make easier money is to use your hobby as a means of earning. Some hobbies lead themselves easily to this and of course, if you enjoy it as a hobby, then you will enjoy it even more when that interest starts making you money.

Most people at some point in growing up started a collection of something or other whether it is a weekly comic, stamps, coins, trading cards, football cards etc.

All these simple things are now highly sought after, again by those seeking the nostalgia of the item, or because someone who used to collect as a child and never managed to complete a set of say football cards from the bubble gum packs. These people are willing to pay good money to obtain these items. What was a rare card when you were collecting is still a rare card now and probably even rarer because anyone who had managed to find it as a child is likely to have used it, traded it or piled it in a box of other stuff so it may have gotten damaged and perhaps just thrown away because the owner no longer had an interest in it. The few people who managed to keep these things by say putting them up in an attic and forgetting about them until now may have themselves a veritable treasure trove.

The same goes for comic collections. Those weekly comics you used to get a read and re-read perhaps even while having a bath. They too are valuable. Almost any printed paper from the past is of value to someone even the wrappers from the bubble gum cards. For instance a Batman bubble gum wrapper alone in perfect condition is now worth as much as £20 or more. Why? Well it is simple, people used to buy the packs fro what was inside and the wrapper was 99 times out of 100 just thrown away or torn apart to get to the cards inside and therefore it has become very hard to find. The true collector can also be a ‘completist' and they have to own everything to do with their chosen subject.

So if you have kids already and they are collecting the latest craze be it Pokemon cards, Doctor Who cards etc by all means encourage them to get these things and get them yourself because if kids are collecting them there are parents who earn enough and are daft enough to pay you good money if you stumble upon that rare card as their kid still wants it and they can get it for them as a present.

A hot item as I write is the Doctor Who Battles in Time card sets. Already in its third series it has become a huge money spinner and it is not too late to get on the Band Wagon and make yourself some money quite easily. The card packs are available form most newsagents in the UK and it is possible to buy them on the Internet on places like Ebay to have them sent to other countries. It is because these are English cards made in the UK and because Doctor Who is a Sci-Fi icon popular all over the world that collectors in other countries cannot get the cards as easily as we can in the UK. The cards randomly have inserted into them Rare, Super Rare and Ultra Rare cards and these are the main source of easy money. To supplement the card packs there is a magazine each month which has free items inside sometimes it contains special cards only issued with the magazine and not available in the packs. Again if you are in the UK you can get these from any newsagents.

I have found that buying the magazine which this month comes with a collectors card album and two packs of cards (one of which includes an exclusive card) it is possible to open the packs take out what you want yourself and sell the album and the duplicate cards you have for the original price of the magazine. Selling these leave you with the magazine itself and the start of a collection plus the exclusive card to resell individually. This can mean a profit to you of up to £5 for each magazine as the exclusive card alone is in the Ultra Rare format.

This is one example of how to make money easily and an example that is available to you right now.

I will be targeting various hobbies in the coming weeks and giving you a few tips on them so keep looking.

How to make money .

Obviously this is something we would all like to do. There are no ‘easy' ways it is true but there are ‘easier' ways than you might first think.

In the last 15 years the Internet has truly become a global marketplace. It is now possible for anyone with a computer and modem to make transactions almost everywhere in the world from the comfort of their own home.

Think back to when you were about 14 years old I am sure you will remember your parents clearing out what they called ‘rubbish' whether it was your much beloved comic collection or broken toys or even old copies of the ‘Radio Times' from the BBC which admittedly at the time were just TV Guides and no-one really thought that they would become a ‘collectable' in the years to come. Apart from your own stuff they were probably throwing away lots of other ‘rubbish'. Well truth is that 90% of that ‘rubbish' is actually saleable nowadays.

Time does strange things and when someone gets that sense of nostalgia and a yearning for something they used to have as a kid and they find that because they have a job with a half decent income they can now ‘relive their childhood' by re-acquiring the long lost item(s) and when that happens a market is created.

People out there are willing to buy your old items or even broken items because in the 60's and 70's toys were made to have a shelf life of only a short period. They were mostly made out of plastic and kids being kids they played with and broke many of these things, virtually no-one kept the original boxes and so these broken items were discarded. And this is what makes them valuable now because there are so few left even in broken condition because when it was binned it went to the rubbish tip and the incinerator.

People become desperate to find that lost item again even in the condition you yourself would consider worthless.

The secret is DO NOT THROW AWAY anything that you and your friends really enjoyed using, reading or playing with because someone will want it in the future.

Of course mint condition is the ideal grade for anything collectable but most people cannot afford mint condition and they make do with lesser graded items, some as a rebuild project, some to own it once again some because they want to see why it was so popular.

An old Action Man may have lost his outfit or his gun. Is he worthless? No way he is valuable. Doll collectors will avidly purchase a naked Action Man figure from the 60's and even 70's because they know that somewhere else there will be a person who has no doll but still has the outfit or the gun. On their own they are no real use except that is to make you money because whoever buys the naked Action man wants to cloth him in original 60's or 70's outfits and try and make him complete again. And once he is complete he will sell for 5 times the amount or maybe more.

So you see money is relatively easy to make. All you need to know now is where to find these things?

Stay tuned as I will give you pointers on how to earn money from what you know and what you didn't even know you knew.