If you are a coin collector, you may be familiar with the Box of Twenty Concept.  For those who aren't, you may know that coins also have grading services.  Yes, you can send coins off to be slabbed.  If you send a bunch of them off, as dealers often do, the grading companies will return them in plastic boxes that hold twenty slabs.  Those plastic boxes are desirable as storage boxes for a collection of slabbed coins.

Coin collectors came up with a concept called a "box of twenty".  It's a way of collecting.  The idea is that the collector must limit themselves to a collection that will fit in one single box.  At first, it's not a problem, but over time, it gets harder.  The rules for collecting this way is that once the box is full, you're required to swap out coin per coin. So if you want to add a new coin, you have to sell an old one.  While this seems restricting, what it forces the collector to do is to collect what is most important to them.  And what happens over time is the collection can become spectacular because the proceeds from the sale of an old coin can be used to fund a new one, so lots of upgrading occurs.  I'm doing this myself with my own coin collection, but I don't have the box filled yet.  However, I am aware that any coin in my collection may be sold at some point, so I try to keep an eye on how much I spend on coins relative to their value.  In short, I want to be able to sell it for at least as much as I bought it for (after fees), so I try to find good deals on what I buy.

Well here's the thing.  In my safe deposit box, I've figured out that I only have room for 30 comic book slabs.  You can see where I'm going with this.  If I'm going to collect nicer bronze comics, I'm going to use a "box of 30" collecting style.  So I will do a few things:

1.  I plan to limit my Bronze Keys to 30 comics.  Therefore, I need to be fussy about what I add.

2.  Because I may need to sell my acquisitions later so that my newest purchase can fit in the box, I intend to make sure that I get a good price on what I buy.

3.  I need to learn to upgrade.  For example, my X-men set will top out at nine (9) slots in my 30-slab collection.  It will take up a lot of room, but I don't want to break the set.  So I will upgrade them here and there.  To do that, at any given time, I may put my comics up for sale at a price that makes me happy.  When one does sell, I will then add some money to the proceeds to buy and upgrade for the slab I just sold.  Makes sense, right?  The other thing I may try to do is just take my slab(s) to shows with the idea that I can pay a dealer to take my lower grade comic in trade for a higher grade one.  I have only tried this once, without luck, but that was because the dealer had another copy of the same book in a comparable grade that I owned and they didn't want two of them.  I understand this because having two different grades provides choices to their customers.  Also, this might be difficult depending on how much profit the dealer is trying to make on the upgrade.  If they try to get all of their profit in that one transaction, we probably won't be able to make a deal.   Please tell me your upgrade stories.   Hmm...since nobody reads this thread but me, I might ask that question in the main forums...

So that's it.  I intend to have a small collection of kick azz comics that will get more impressive over time.  (When I'm not spending money on my coin collection or collector car!)

Any feedback on this method?

Steve