There are probably lurkers here that are younger tbh XD.
Do you have a day job, or plan on a higher education/career?
Id focus on yourself while enjoying the hobby. Also what is your connection to the hobby? Collecting can be alot more fun if you have an attachment to the games/anime etc. Its basically like a friend at that point.
College, summer job, nostalgia. Im thinking about making theme binders. Like a binder of common (but colorful cards) A vintage holo binder, etc
Oh yeah, and ray ray (Ive got to make a topic on why hes top 3 pokemon later)
I would add that, without a good capital to start it becomes increasingly more difficult to make profit:
-you can buy less card, so the probability to get a good grade decreases
-you can afford low quality and cheaper cards, risking to fall in a trap like buying bad card lots, unlimited venomoth holos or overprinted promos
-you cannot take an L almost never, and you cannot afford to have 1000$ stuck in some investment waiting for a good market rebound
-I also presume that Vertemes is still interested in building his own collection, so his budget would be even less
Iâd say it takes about $1000-2000 to get started. All you need to do is pick a couple popular species from the latest few sets (SV era) and buy 20-30 near mint copies off of a site like TCGPlayer.
So far youâre in $500-1000 and ~10 minutes of work.
Next you simply wait for your cards to come in. TCGPlayer unfortunately lets sellers wait up to a week or 2 to ship, and I swear some of them intentionally go to 13 days every time. Whatever, within a month youâll have your cards and still have only spent the same initial capital plus maybe up to 30 minutes now walking to and from the mailbox.
Pregrade your cards. Whitening on the back? Donât grade it. Front centering looking off immediately very lop sided? Donât grade it. This takes about 5-30 seconds per card.
Expect 10-20% of the cards purchased to actually be gradable. The rest just list on eBay or TCGPlayer and return them to the market at market price, eating the 13.25% loss. If you want to speculate and specifically bought singles you also think will go up, feel free to list them higher. Expect to wait for sales in that case. This step should not take more than 1 minute per card. And keep in mind you donât have 120-150 cards. You have 3-5 cards, and quantity of each of them.
Ship your cards to PSA. Use a discount shipping service like pirateship to get a label, tracking, etc.
When grades come back in 30-60 days (been pretty fast lately), list your 9s and 10s on eBay at market price and wait for sales. Itâs not that hard. If you have a GameStop nearby, see what they will purchase any 8, 9, and 10 for. In my experience their prices are actually not bad when they have the card in their system. $2.70 means they have no data, thatâs their default floor price.
Can you make more per hour working a professional career job? Absolutely. Do you get to handle PokĂ©mon cards, think about Pokemon, and run âyour own business?â No. People saying you make more doing minimum wage⊠idk about that one. Also if youâre outside the U.S. sorry I have no advice for that.
That bottom paragraph is exactly why i started a pokemon store.
If I were you Id personally start the rayquaza collection and buying the most sought after ones first with the money you save up. This is coming from one species collector to another, but youâll be a lot happier, and financially better collecting things that make you happy VS following the trends of what investors think is a good idea because youll always be one step behind. Not to mention youâre always here, so updating the collection and sharing between everyone may change your thought process on flipping with a newfound love of how you collect.
My advice was not âdonât grade and flipâ. It was that the most successful flippers with limited capital find a way to do it in a way where you canât be easily outcompeted by others who can out-optimize you.
That said, itâs never been harder and more risky to grade and flip. For a high school student who is staking nearly 100% of their net worth on each play, it is highly inadvisable. Itâs far more productive to build up a better starting position with a stable job and get to the point where you have a bit of money to play around with and can lose without catastrophic consequences.
I want the ray ray gold star so badâŠ
This is all solid advice for someone in their late 20s - 30s with liquid capital and capacity to take financial risks, but less so for an impressionable 15 year old kid easily influenced by people 2x - 3x his age.
Also heres the thing: I love my store.
Its not exactly just making a profit. The reasearch, planning, buying, shipping, communication is wheres it at. It gives me training u cant do at a 9 to 5.
Im happy with my store, and if i could do it full time, I garauntee u i would
I would make that a focus, and start saving now. Ill admit that the gold star wont go down as it will never be printed again, but that doesnt mean it will shoot up like crazy. Owning something worth alot money is fine, but adding it to your collection feels 1000000x better than any âprofitâ you could get from it IF you truly do enjoy it. Posting it on here will make EVERYONE on this forum happy as well, so consider it a goal NOW, and act on it is my advice. It doesnt even have to be a fancy high grade either as long as you enjoy it. I buy cards I like raw, and just put them in a protected binder because I like them.
Tl;dr Go save up for the things you want now, and do not make any excuses. Ive had regrets in the past myself for this exact situation. Just do it!.jpg
I agree 100% with the arguments that doing high-volume, low-margin modern grade-and-flip is extremely optimized and you will likely lose money or break even at best if you try to do it.
Modern works great for businesses because it has a nearly endless supply of mint condition cards, itâs easily accessible, and PSA is fast. It doesnât matter if you net $1-2 in profit per VSTAR Universe PSA 10 you grade if you can do that 5000 times by clicking âadd to cartâ and âcheckoutâ on cardrush. Itâs time-efficient, repeatable, and it helps that modern has a huge market these days. However, businesses often net $1-2 in profit because they have shipping discounts, eBay fee discounts, PSA dealer rates, etc. They are taking advantage of a plethora of benefits because of their high volume. As a new collector without these advantages, you will not be able to keep up with businesses.
Others are also right that buying raw cards to grade and flip isnât a completely lost cause. As usual, @pfm has it right: you need to find a niche that you can slot in and succeed at, that canât be replicated at scale by large businesses whose goals include the consistent and repeatable profit that modern provides.
On a personal note, I have succeeded in building immense value in my collection over the years by locating and grading higher-value vintage cards. It is volatile, risky, and inconsistent. At times there are no deals to be had. Itâs gotten much harder recently with proliferating scams on Yahoo and the decrease in graded card value, but itâs still possible. Iâve also built value by purchasing raw cards that arenât worth grading at the time, waiting several years for the value to go up, and then grading for a profit. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesnât. Businesses cant do that at scale because of the inconsistency and the challenge of having capital tied up for an indefinite period of time.
All of my strategy is enabled because I have an actual job that pays me enough money to cover my costs of living with a bit left over for Pokemon. Itâs also highly reliant on the knowledge and skill I have built over 10 years in the hobby. Even then, it can take a long time to build any kind of profit and youâre still at the whims of the larger market.
My personal advice is to keep doing what youâre doing: start small. Learn how to pregrade. Learn how to sell efficiently and effectively. Practice with your store now is absolutely going to help you out in the long run if thatâs what you want to do. However, you should definitely get a âreal jobâ so you donât need to rely on flipping to pay bills.
Maybe being a bit controversial here, but honestly I think if there was ever a time to play around with money, have fun, learn some new skills etc with risk of failure, its when youâre 15. The fact that youâre using your first bits of income to try to make money in a way you enjoy puts you absolute lightyears ahead of your peers.
You say you love your store. Putting money into it sounds like it will be a very fulfilling hobby to you. If you lose money, you lose money. But most kids your age would be chucking that shit on vbucks anyways so now is the time to take the risk imo. Donât avoid what may be a very enjoyable venture because of the risk, when you currently have the least amount of financial responsibilities you will ever have.
I agree with this. At 15 you have almost no responsibilities. What is the worst that happens if you make $1000 at your summer job then fail to make any money flipping PokĂ©mon cards and stay at 1000, or worst case scenario go down to 500? I guess it would be that you lost $500 and learned one path of what not to do. Unfortunately there are infinite of those, but still, itâs valuable life experience and the risk is basically nothing.
Unless you also live alone and are the sole provider of all resources to pay your living expenses, these fears of âmassive financial riskâ are significantly overblown for someone that has zero actual financial responsibilities.
Yeah exactly - I would still say that it is only worth it if he truly truly enjoys it. At that point its a hobby, and having any hobby where you might make some money is pretty nice, even if he ends up making not a lot (quite probable 
)
Last month I accidentally bought a PSA membership. So I thought, âHey, why not flip a few cards from my collection and sell them to cover the cost of the Membership?â ($200 CAD by the way).
I quickly found out that if the cards I sent got 10s and if I sold them at good prices, Iâd be making like $5-$25 per card. Not bad, but not worth my time.
And I do!
This is definitely not related to the question you are asking. However, buying collections and flipping singles is a surefure way to make money. Granted you need a pretty good chunk of starting capital to do it, but if you are paying cash at 60% to 70% of market for collections your margins are already built it.
Disclaimer, when buying collections like this you are often saddled with undiserable cards/items but often in order to get the good stuff you gotta buy the bad stuff too.
I will add that this is where grading and flipping is still very much doable, if buying large amounts of ungraded collections. Echoing what others have said, this is very not newcomer friendly because it requires knowledge and money.
I agree with what @Tyranids and @thurco are saying about the risks being lower when you are younger. But the question is about making money flipping and the answer still is itâs very hard to do effectively.
Itâs not a question of whether or not @Vertemes should sell cards. He already has an ebay account and is picking up experience. The question is should he scale up his expenses 50-100x in order to make more money. My answer would be a resounding no. As far as I can tell, doesnât have this magical $1000-2000 to blow on grading. A significant sale to him is $8, which is not a dig itâs the reality here.
Which is why the advice is to make the $1000-2000 first at a stable job before grading. After that point we can talk about viable options. A steady income at that age gives you plenty of leeway to make mistakes and then easily recover from them instead of leveraging debt to spend $200 on a flip that flops and being stuck in the red. It also means you can actually hold onto cards for longer stretches of time without being forced to sell, thatâs where the real money is actually made.
I canât add to what everyone else has already said other than to give my own experience of selling cards and having moved away from putting energy into it for the time being.
I still have a very small eBay store but because of all the above reasons, competition, ÂŁ/hr, eBay hassle, the energy investment is just not worth it for me right now, and thatâs even while knowing where there are a good opportunities to buy and grade to turn a profit amongst all the noise. At the start of 2024 I just instead moved completely to the buy/hold/St0nk approach, until such a time that it becomes worth listing again.
My full time job is super chilled, and I felt like I could be doing more to earn cash to buy cards and products. A couple months back my dad gifted me some of his old Stihl gardening tools and I started picking up weekend / after-work gardening jobs. I do a fair bit of work around quite affluent areas in Edinburgh and Iâll average ÂŁ40-45 GBP/hr trimming hedges and mowing lawns. I love doing it so much that it doesnât feel like work. Aside from the occasional higher-margin card opportunities like pfm mentioned, thereâs just no contest between these gardening jobs and selling cards, at least for the time being. Iâve also become much happier and healthier.