"Time is the only true currency in life."

"Finance is the art of passing currency from hand to hand until it finally disappears."
Robert W. Sarnoff

"Where there's hope, there's fire."

Ok, maybe that last one is a mix-up of two common sayings but it will relate to today's blog eventually.

The story began eight years ago when a multi-generational family stamp collection was passed on to me. The four boxes full of stamps and albums were reviewed and roughly sorted before going into a closet for further storage. Two weeks ago, I was inspired to find a resolution to the collection when I found myself with some downtime while awaiting a business proposal response. It led to a personal detour into the world of stamp collecting. I only emerged from my philatelic cocoon last night at midnight and I thought I would share my thoughts from the experience.

Stamps are a currency. Since 1840 when the first stamp was issued in Britain, they have been a necessary expense to facilitate sending physical mail. For most of the last 150 years, significant artistry and creativity has been employed by over 200 countries to proudly design and sell an incredible array of stamps. As a result, for most of the 20th century, collecting, trading and selling mint and used stamps has become a popular pastime.

But now the industry is slowly dying. The quality of modern stamps has been decreasing for years. The prime mission of stamps is disappearing as most correspondence now happens online. There aren't new collectors coming into the philatelic world. There are even threats from governments of removing the value from older stamps which would collapse 90% of what remains in the value of stamp collecting.

In my case in order to find resolution for the stamp collection, I needed to become better acquainted with the process of stamp collecting and its dynamics. I threw myself into long days of familiarizing myself with the routines of sorting, typing, displaying, researching and organizing a collection. After it was presentable, I consulted a respected collector, the largest stamp dealer on the west coast, and a noted stamp auctioneer. Each echoed similar sentiments that in the current environment if time and supplies were included, stamp collecting wasn't a profitable venture except in high volume or very specialized circumstances. One dealer shared his own personal history of developing a collection over a couple decades that reached a peak value of $50,000 that today is valued at only $500 due to devaluation of stamps from certain areas.

Much like a lottery perspective, the dream of finding that one lone $10,000 Haiti stamp or the $2.3 million 1855 Swedish Treskilling Yellow stamp keeps many involved and active in the field. Personally, I enjoyed a number of elements of working the 1880's to 1960's collection; the historical appeal, the geographic appeal, the artistic appeal, and the challenge of curation. I can see the reasons that relatives spent many hours collecting during the last century. But in the current diminishing stamp collecting environment, I could no longer justify the time if there wasn't to be a significant monetary benefit. My time currency outweighed the fading stamp currency. I have prepared the collection and will submit it for a twice-yearly stamp auction this fall. The hope of seeing that big payoff will now pass to that future winning bidder, but I appreciated my brief but engrossingly intense look into the world of specialized collecting.