Ok you caught me haha only one more post!
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I really appreciate what everyone has contributed. This is a great read and thank you all. I like how everyones story showcases different levels to where the beginners and the people whom admire meet.
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I am a nobody in the pokemon community lol but I am a businessman and used that knowledge for pokemon investing/collecting and have been able to build a fairly large collection (about 50K to 55K) market value for FREE! I only got back in when evolutions came out so only about 3ish years to get there.
I cant speak to going full time quick but I can say this has to be treated like long term mutual funds or a 401k and not a daytrader mentality.
Meaning you need to diversify between proven investments like WOTC sealed and WOTC PSA 10, some new product you think may take off in the future, and also your flips that you can buy and sell quickly to help fund your collection.
THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX! When you need cashflow in the beginning dont just look at a card that sells for $30 and try to win a weird time auction for $17 and then flip it to make maybe $5 after fees. NO! maybe consider buying complete 1st edition NM/M sets and grading the holos, completing sets that may be worth more as a whole than seperate cards are, Private message sellers who have a large amount of items and ask for bulk deals to help them clear out inventory (YES EVERYONE NEEDS CASH AT SOME POINT AND WILL MAKE DEALS TO SELL A LOT OF ITEMS ALL AT ONCE).
And like other major sellers have said like smpratte and tcagaming TAKE RISKS IF YOU CAN AFFORD TO WITH PROFITS!!! Back when 1st edition fossil booster boxes were way undervalued going for $1300 to $1500 less than a year ago I bought and opened some to grade the holos. The risk was calculated because i knew only a couple PSA 10s out of 12 chances with mid range holos would be enough to break even after selling the light packs for display/collection purposes to people and selling the 9s or 8s you get. And i knew if i were to get lapras dragonite gengar etc. PSA 10 then the profits would be pretty good! Another risk I took was buying a complete shadowless set in NM condition to grade the holos. I ended up making a small profit buy selling all the holos except Charizard but was able to keep a PSA 9 shadowless charizard which is starting to be worth a pretty penny now. SO just a few exacples of how to move in to this.
LAST once you do make some good flips take the money and buy investments and keep those away to build your collection. Whatever you like PSA 10s, sealed boxes, sealed packs, sets. Then rinse and repeat.
HOPE THAT HELPS maybe not go full time but build a collection for free. O and to be transparent i started a little under 1K in the beginning so not nothing but not much to get to where i am. So its for sure possible still. Goodluck Collecting!
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I do not know anyone doing Pokemon 100% full time right now who did not do one of these two things:
- Start 10+ years ago.
- Enter with $100,000+ in working capital.
Not saying there isn’t a single exception anywhere in the world, but apart from extreme circumstances like wandering into an off the grid store with $500K in product for sale at 5% value or seeing $50K in cards from 2006 turn into a $2,000,000 inventory, you just have to have the time into it or an obscene bankroll. Most people naturally put in time over capital because it is rare that a person has the depth of knowledge and unique combination of skills/personality to make this yield more than other business opportunities, pushing capital-driven entities elsewhere.
There is also a non-negligible portion of full timers that are receiving health benefits through a spouse and benefiting from a dual-income household. I’m in that camp. I have the luxury of putting 80%+ of my earnings back into Pokemon with a 20-year and 30-year vision of wealth building because I don’t have to worry about all the bills, how to pay for a doctor’s visit, or, at this point in time, children.
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Please try to create more useful or curious posts so the entire community can enjoy your presence 
@funmonkey54,@mysterydungeongaming, Hey Guys, thanks for the In-depth answer as well. I really appreciate your
honest answer and you even giving out some Ideas how you made some money off of it. I really love this community for being so open and honest. Much Love 
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I just wrote a draft @funmonkey54 that may have been answered doing it lol.
Offtopic but @genchiro, looking at your icon have you seen the recent Japanese PC campaign involving Larvitar & Tyranitar as parenting? May be your thing, it involves the other high BST non legendaries.
By shilling all your auctions and immediately flipping cards.
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Just looked it up they look really cute. Sadly I’m not the plushies Type. My heart beats for the cards and games
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Would this be reffering to the difficulty of standing out as an individual representing the same brand after others experienced do and why should someone choose you over them? Sorry not sure what this means if exclusive to pokémon as a model where research is unavoidable I’m guessing since individuality is key anywhere. [edit] Its more of the latter part but I may have it now. It was the comparison between both entitties.
I’m saying that people who are skilled in business have a lot of reasons to go elsewhere for money. Pokemon is objectively lower-yielding than other types of business. You will work harder for less profit, put up with more shit, and take a lot less home than if you went into other types of business. The more skilled you are as a business person, the truer this is.
Staying in Pokemon is an act of passion.
Whether you leverage a public-facing persona as a part of your strategy is a personal and optional choice. Standing out against other sellers is not as important in Pokemon as it is in, say, car sales. This is because Pokemon is primarily bought and sold on platforms that aggregate options and allow a high degree of control (through filters) for the consumer. eBay, Troll and Toad, TCGplayer, and cardmarket are the first places that come to mind for me. None of these do much to give sellers the opportunity to leverage who they are. The bulk of sales in Pokemon online are taking place in environments that iron out the inefficiencies that a seller might otherwise be able to leverage to increase margin.
Pokemon also has a weird combination of incentives that lead to people doing things like working for free. You have people willing to sell booster boxes for a $1 margin because they consider it fun. This is inherently damaging to the hobby-as-occupation model and creates a lot of instability while encouraging consumer behavior that hurts the hobby as a whole. Other products are more clear-cut in their incentives/margins and the occupational sales arena balances differently because people don’t sell insurance, for example, for shits and giggles.
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I agree with your explanation. However, I’m also curious on what you think about the ‘time’ factor. The people that are living off of Pokémon appear to have been in the running for quite some time now. Do you think that a person (with the qualities stated in your post) that would start today would be able to live off of Pokémon?
My personal thought is that it might be possible but given the growth of the hobby it will most likely be (a lot) more difficult than let’s say five years ago.
@engadgeter, Time is always a factor. In general I don’t think most businesses take off right out of the gate. Most businesses carry a loss for the first 5 years, some for more depending on the industry.
Cost is always overlooked in hindsight. People tend to romanticize the lower prices of being first to market while forgetting it came with the largest amount of risk. Back then it took forever to sell, even the most liquid items, and prices were much lower, making it much more difficult to earn a livable wage. While prices are obviously higher today, so is the size of the market and frequency of sales. Therefore you can expedite what might have taken years in the past today.
Overall every moment has an opportunity cost; its all about identifying and adapting to that moment. Time is necessary, but its much easier to transact today than 10 years ago.
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I live on the streets and only eat once a week. Charizard > quality of life.
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Many thanks smpratte - very solid answers to my question and I couldn’t agree with you more.
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Thisssss. Thank you for elaborating. Not to be in pokémon’s defense at core it does seem to have flexibility (the aggregation) going for it by breaching into video games, media or art or social/ competitive events of diffrent media demographic comnsumption but as said the filtering is another story. In recent measure I’ve been checking seeing how PC London has been doing and its a win/lose situation which it’s ploy drive is following with ones passion and it’s fallibility for leverage. It’s selling everything but being abundantly further from the demand requiring to the point of security turning away public to even join the queues. Feel need to redirect me if I don’t know what I’m talking about. Don’t mean to branch off too much it’s a macro prime example of modern leverage in effect as not cost effective sadly based on Pokémon as a source, a demand requirement reality check meeting a naive guessswork expectation to Europes interest long overdue in being absent.
Passion is a strange rolemodel because it seems to have relation in working with ones skills as stated on first paragraph but also to be a breath away from more depressingly egregious alternatives.
The last paragraphs absurdity seems like things not even seen in the people of Discworld. The motive behind the booster box margin has to be some extreme case of one already meeting past a goal in orer to make sense. Not for businesses but for people just wanting to get rid of there excess fat I can see that understood a bit more and I know that the part about people working for free isn’t the same as casually volunteering.
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In my case i do have a work as a Lawyer for a logistics company; also getting some extra income that comes from rent. I noticed i ended up earning money after my 1st Pokemon Card Sub, and this is what i did.
I bought several raw cards from eBay for my binder collection a couple yars ago; most of them were Near Mint - Mint. When i decided to grade them, a big chunk got solid grades (9-10). Ended up selling some cards that didnt fit in my collection and was astonished how valuable they were in PSA10.
Cards i bought for 10-15U$S were selling for 100$. Gold Stars that were bought Raw for 140-150 were worth 500plus!
So yeah…i’d say a good way to get money is buying raw; grading and selling - keeping what fits in your collection!
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I can’t even live off the skills I spent years earning a degree in Lmao
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What is your degree in?
My wife and I live so far below our means currently that I know I could go full time pokemon and get by. I’ve done well with it on the side, but to go full time it’d just be way longer work weeks than I am currently doing with a lot less pay and less consistent/stable pay too. It’s fun as a hobby but relying on it for my livelihood would take some fun away I’m sure. I also wouldn’t hit the savings rate I currently do and wouldn’t have access to a 401(k) either. The freedom would be awesome but I’m hoping if I play my cards right I wont need to work til 65+ as most do these days.
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Like most people have stated here, I simply resell cards that I end up with extras of. I decided that once I complete my collection, I am going to set up a separate fund solely for buying and selling Pokemon cards. Ideally Pokemon would be a self sustaining hobby for me but there are too many things I need to own before that can happen 
It’s kinda like what we use to say about professional gamblers. They lose for a living;)