I completely disagree. I sold everything back in 2017. I had $6-8k in stocks at the end of 2019. I’ve been constantly buying, grading and selling to buy cards for my collection or use it as a supplemental income. The only thing I had left was some empty pack wrappers that I sold for $1500-2000. Right now I have a revolving door. I’ve had a bunch of “lucky” collection finds but I find that the longer you’re in the hobby, the more often you’ll find these “lucky” collections. Overall it’s just margins and consistency. Outside of that I’ve managed to find 2-3 big “lucky” finds each year I’ve been in the hobby.
As far as selling goes according to my PayPal. I have never received money. Only payments between friends 
I think the whole PayPal family and friends and avoiding taxes is such a stupid concept. If you’re doing business well enough you’re going to have money coming in your account that you will have to pay taxes on. All these people saying don’t take any goods and services payment over $600 otherwise you got to pay taxes to the government or so short-sighted. It’s like people saying that they don’t want to work out too hard cuz they don’t want to get too buff. I’ve been paying taxes since 2012 with regards to pokémon. I honestly don’t see what the big deal is.
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Personally, I had kind of run into the dilemma of maybe selling too quickly, especially early on. Like many, I was super excited in the beginning and just wanted to collect a lot of amazing cards I wanted. I mean, it’s still kinda like that! But with not a lot of funds I’d just buy booster packs or whatever else I could afford, and it was exciting – but whenever I pulled something of “value” I was pretty quick to sell it. All of this was simply because I wanted to buy some more product and singles, ones that I did want or have a sort of wish list of. Ones I wanted more than some of the pulls I had gotten. It was easy to see a booster pack or two costing only a couple bucks, and when I was lucky to get even something worth ten dollars or more than that I was eager to sell in order to buy more cheap singles I wanted and loved and so on. It definitely felt like flipping and I didn’t really enjoy it, but it was more or less just a chance to have more fun money to put back into the hobby, and to even push aside cards I didn’t feel attached to. Thankfully I slowed down a lot in terms of excitement, but that was my beginning. Because of that, I’m pretty comfortable selling things when I’d like to. And thankfully, that means not selling much at all nowadays. And I’m glad! Because the selling and the flipping mentality or necessity wasn’t very fun at all. Collecting without selling is awesome too! And it doesn’t matter what pace you go at. Gotta do what you want to do. 
For me, it is the principal. My job is heavily commission based which gets taxed out the ass. I’ve never come close to the $20,000/200 transactions, so I haven’t reported my income from cards. Why would I? So the government can take even more money from me and I can make my taxes that much more confusing? I’ve scaled back in recent years and will now only buy cards that I can see permanently being in my collection. I’m not paying the tax and I’m not running around begging for cash app or F&F payments.
basically never. whenever i had sold something i regret it after.
Thanks for the comments. I’ve decided to put an automatic amount to myself every month to supplement the card collecting. I enjoyed the different perspectives in how you guys collect.
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