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Here is a link that will show you a few that have sold in the past. Without a subscription you can’t see the prices but the top 3 selling prices was approx. $29.99 +/- and the lowest 3 were approx. was $15 to $17.
Hope this helps… Ooppss! Here is the link. https://www.scavengerlife.com/forums/topic/harley-davidson-business-card-holder/#post-39750
mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art in Atlanta
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This reply was modified 3 years, 4 months ago by
MDC Galleries & Fine Art.
That’s interesting Jay. First thing I thought of is it’s a grill grate from a Weber or similar Gas Grill. The whole structure looks just the same except for the 4 plastic feet. I wonder if Ikea buys grill grates at cost and just a quick plastic “gee gaw” add on and Viola’ instant Ikea trivet. If so they must get those grates dirt cheap. The ones for Weber and Grill Master are a whole lot more than $6 bucks ++.
mike
I just Googled it on the spot as I prepared for the reply to the post. no magic, a web site came right up that had the data. So I guess the story of the blind squirrel finding a nut occasionally applies. π
Ryanne that would be great. I hear the “E-Packet” price grid that items come from China uses allows small, light weight items to be shipped to the USA for as low as $.25 per package. It would be great if that could be a reciprocity thing whereby we only pay the same thing going back to them.
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art
The reason I asked “if you have to pay any taxes”, is that you will be surprised how you can lower what you have to pay.
This is how, go to the web sites of places around you that you can donate to and download and print out their “Donation Value Guide”. These are fairly thorough pricing guides as to what the “donated tax value” is for each item you donate. The Goodwill one is bad. Too short and not thorough at all. But the Salvation Army one is detailed, has many categories and has good valuations for items that you donate.They show a price range for each item, Low to High. We just use a price in between [avg. the two].
You will be surprised at how much you can write off if you donate items to these places. Now you may only get a percetage of what you declare as the value of the items you donate, but it may come out to be more than $.99 you were going to place in an auction and you don’t have to do any work other than create a written list of what you donate, get a receipt when you donate, and put a valuation price beside it. Oh course, you do have to itemize your taxes in order to take advatage of this.
But here are some examples of the price ranges the salvation army places on items donated to them. We find we get a better value by donating and using these prices instead of having a yard sale and a whole lot less work.
Some of the categories are of course Men’s Clothing, Women’s Clothing, Appliances, Home Goods, Furniture, Childrens clothes,
end table: $10 to $50; coffee table: $15-$65; rug: $20-$90; blanket: $3-$15; coffeemaker: $4-$15; Lamp: $5-$75; pillow: $2-$8; a dinner plate: $.50-$3.00; man’s shirt: $2.50-$12.00; men’s shoes: $3.50-$25; mens shorts: $3.50-$10; womens blouse: $2.50-$12.00; womens dress: $4-$20.00; womens shoes: $2-$25;I think you can see what we mean. We use the middle of these and in many cases the tax donated value is more than we could even get for the low end, lower quality, run of the mill stuff we get in box lots, or cleaning out old inventory that we made mistakes on. Fast, easy, and at pretty good prices.
BUT_BUT, you have to need tax write offs in order to lower your tax liability. If your income level is low and standard deductions are better or if you don’t itemize your year end taxes, then these donated values won’t be of much help.
Hopefully they may.
Good Luck.Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art
T-Satt: Knowing you and some of us like numbers.. And presented in a positive light..4 numbers for comparison
Clicked on Vintage for Sale in Mercari and there are 95 pages x 50 listings per page for a total of 4.750 [guess some of those are HomeDecorGuys] vs. 15,170,343 on Ebay.
Now the one that caught my eye:
6 months of visitors to Ebay is 1.10 BILIION Potential Customers vs. 33.73 Million over 6 months for Mercari.
…>>> So, how I guess with being in a mix of only 5k other vintage items does not seem like a whole lot of competition.. but then again, you got to have traffic [buyers].As Arsenio Hall used to say.. some things just make you go .. HHhhmmm!
Not being negative just stating the numbers or as Jack Webb used to say on Dragnet.. Just the facts ma’ame! LOL πSheesh is right. Boy what a trial you have been through. And God Blessed you to help keep that roof over you and your husbands head.
Before I go into a suggestion that may be of interest, first a question that would pertain to that answer.
Do you end up paying taxes at the end of the year or do you pay quarterly taxes or have any tax money taken out of some sort of an income check? Depending on if the answer is yes or no, it would save me from going through the tip for you.
Mike at MDC Galleries
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This reply was modified 3 years, 4 months ago by
MDC Galleries & Fine Art.
OK.. If that works, we will see. I just went out into the storage area and told all my inventory ” it is time to get the hell out”, “go find a new home”. “The bins are tired of enabling you and carrying you for all this time”. “Go forth and find your new home” “and be quick about it”.
So, we will see, Guess I better get ready for a thousand Sales over the next few days. Boy, I am sure glad you clued me in on this “new thechnique”. I had no idea what may be the reason for periodic slow sales, but no I am enlightened. It is just a matter of implementing “tough love” to our inventory. LOL.. needed some humor. In the m iddle of listing 38 new items and getting “punch listing drunk”.
I am right there with you T-Satt. Early bird for me. I try to be in the office between 5-6:30 am. I have an alarm set in case I over sleep, but usually been working for awhile in the office when it goes off.
Now, Susan and the cats. Three of a kind. By the time they drift into the office, I have worked for 4 to 5 hours, drank a whole pot of coffee, and am ready to go out to an early lunch. LOL
By 6 PM I am ready for an hour or so of rest and research [R&R], a few videos and then lights out around 9 PM. If I have a lot to do, I will wake up at 3-4 AM and hit the office. Seniors also need less sleep. 6 hours and I am good to go. 8 Hrs. great, more and I feel like I have wasted time and lost opportunities.
mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art
I agree with AdvenE: No need to rush. Take your time. Research and check sources. If this guy was famous and did work for the stars, does he have an estate. Are any of his relatives maybe interested in it. Is Burt Reynolds or his heirs maybe interested. Maybe that tax number can be back tracted. Maybe there is a museum of this guys stuff.
Who knows, just throwing out ideas along the lines of following AdvenE line of thinking.
mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art
From day one we started putting mney into the business. Just like a corp. start up loan, we started using anything we thought would help us succeed. We are too old to wait for years to figure things out. Don’t have that much time to spare. It’s kick start the business and have some fun doing it or not.
We have probably had Worthpoint for 5-6 years. Kovels about as long, only we used to buy the annual published book. Big oversized book about 2.5″ thick.
We also strated building our infrastructure rather quickly also. We bought storage cabinets, bins, shelving, printers, 2 computers, etsy store subscription, Shopify store subscription, have a full working art-painting studio combined with wood working and framing shop [600 sq. ft.], fully working separate admin. office/shipping area 320 SF], and if the house next door became available we would consider maybe grabbing that up.
We started out running 6 antique booths at the largest antique mall east of the Mississippi River in Monroe, GA. at $90 each per month. Within 3 years we knew that was a lousy business model. Only person making money at those places are the landlords.
I and wife Susan both fully retired over 2 years ago and then being an entreprenuer type I knew I would just prefer to work my own business and do something Susan and I could do together and do day or weekend trips. So we came out of the shoot running, growing and plow back investing in the company.
We had 3-4 thousand items in the booths but when we went to the online venues we begin to shed off all of the low end, non quality stuff. We used to have one and two dollar items in the booth. not any more. I have posted in the past how we went through tons of death piles after pulling everything out of the booths. we sent close to a 600-700 large, non-shippable furniture and table type items to a local auction house and moved the rest home. Then slowly sorted through them and donated what we didn’t want. we ended up with about a thousand items which we thought was worth time to list. Now for the past several years we have been listening here at SL, working our business, learning more all the time and if something is going to cost us a few dollars a month, we go for it. At almost 70 years old, I am not going to waste 3 or 4 more years trying to figure out if something will help. We do it, use it and if not a fit then we dump it.
So, we went into it knowing we would invest in our future years and we had several smaller sources of income that carried us. We of course have Susan’s and my retirement money monthly / Social Security [for what that is worth], we have a 1,200 sq. ft. full kitchen, 2 bedroom basement apt. we rent out, I sell some art locally and we now have the online venues.
And to date we owe nobody, but boy do we have some money tied up in Glass and Brass π we call it in inventory. But our unit Cost per item has come way down over the last few years and our avg. selling prices have gone up.
So there you have our crazy story in a nutshell. We aren’t scavenging to get to retirement, we are scavenging to STAY in retirement!!
mike at MDCG in Atl.
It might mean that Ebay is not the right platform. Maybe a auction house for higher end items. That $46,000 saddle probably was sold through Sotheby’s or another high end auction house. If u are close to one of them take it in or they also have web sites and for FREE you can send in photos and descriptions and they will let you know if it is something they would like to auction off for you. Saddle Maker to the Stars seems like a craftsman artist who may have some interest for them.
mike at MDCG
You are welcome AdvE:.. One of the other interestings things about both is that they both have a dictionary-glossary of makers marks and hallmark stampings. It helps to identify the marks on the bottom of certain pieces. We have thought we had Japanese pcs ins the past and upon further looking and using their marks guides we found out they were Veitnamese charcters.
The fake identification on Kovels helps. We found out the difference between raised “Roseville” letters [embossed], and recessed “Roseville” letters [de-bossed]. One is the real way Roseville marked their pottery and the ones made in fake molds. After learning that we can now identify the fakes from the reals at auctions within half a second.
Kovels also provides a lot of history on real old pices. When the factory came into being, who founded it, how long in business, when they went out of business or if they were bought up like Fenton and the new owners started re-making the Fenton pieces using the old molds. all very handy things to know if you start to move into the higher collectibles.
Case in point. I am researching a Moser piece we got Sunday. Look up Moser Decanters and see the price ranges. We got this piece for $30 bucks, so now my job is find out if we have the one worths thousands or hundreds but most are all over $450. Not bad for $30 bucks.But will definitely use both WorthPoint and Kovels along with some auction houses to Research.
Think you will find them a “professional tool”. I also said, professional tools for professional people being used in a professional manner. [another one of my sayings I like to quote to the employees, especially when they wanted me to buy them expensive equipment].
you know who, from you know where … π
That is the beauty of WorthPoint. As long as you are not looking at something that sold 10 years ago. That is Jay’s peeve about WorthPoint. Prices that old are of no value except when dealing with real 100 year old antiques.
I find things on Ebay all the time that only show several in the 90 day sold. And at times those sellers had no idea what they had or just saw one at a low price and then matched theirs to that “low” price. That is what keeps the market prices on some things flat because as I call it, “it is a case on the blind leading the blind, down a dark alley on a moonless night”. I love that saying.
we take the highest price we can find, making sure if the highest was unopned, or still with it’s box, or something that makes it special, and we take those high prices and bump up to about 20% higher. We strive to sell ours at a price higher than the highest of WP. We will become the newest highest seller of solds on WP. We also feel we are doing our part in raising the price points of our items instead of contributing to drive the prices down to a flat point.
It doesn’t work in all cases because of a Sale we may run and then maybe taking an offer on top of that. But by pricing high, we have all the wiggle room in the world to run Sales and take offers and still end up around that WorthPoint High.
Jay has said before and it’s in several of the past audio posts to price high. Then I have asked numerous times on the forums, how high is high and no answers. That is why we came up with that crazy mark-up system we use.
If 90 day solds show 4 items sold all for $20 and I see 3 that sold for $75 on WorthPoint, then I price at about $85, will take offers and run a few sales, hoping to sell at the $65 to $75 range. Now for atleast the next 90 days ours will be the highest sold on Ebay and hopefully some of those people who do not do any research on anything but Ebay will see ours and then price their next item-find closer to the $75. Thus in turn helping to raise those prices instead of lowering them.
Before Jay jumps over onto my monitor, no reasearch on this, just our version of his position of pricing high. Love Jay always saying that. He says price high, so we do!! LOL π As high as we can if we can support it with not only WorthPoint, but also Kovels. Kovels is the bible of pricing for collectibles. Antique stores, dealers, always have this years Kovels Pricing Guide around. And it is full of photos of how to tell fakes from reals, and also tells if the market is increasing or decreasing. I have seen dealers with 25 years of back copies of Kovels books on their shelves.
we have an annual online subscription and get a lot of our glass, ceramic, and collectibles of interest from them. Much more so than WorthPoint.
Hope this sheds some light on your inquiry…
Mike at MDCG in Atl.
And if I am not mistaken, SmartPost uses the USPS for the “last leg” of the journey. FedEx flies your package to the closest town they package is going to. Then at that last juncture, they actually turn the package over to the USPS to do the actual ‘to the home delivery”. That being given, then the FedEx SmartPost system has to be proticular and keep within the guidelines of the USPS service also, on top of the Dim. weight issue. 1,728 cubic inches is USPS cutoff before dim. weight, I belive. LxHxW so a 12x12x12=1,728. Larger it will still gobut you may see that oversize bump.
That is why some on here are saying watch the dim weight. It is not just an easy peezt, thought process that SmartPost is always the cheapest.
But I stand for correction, but I am thinking this is maybe correct.
Mike at MDCG
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This reply was modified 3 years, 4 months ago by
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