Using the PSA Vault strictly for personal collection

Collecting
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I’ve been reading a lot of pros and cons regarding the PSA vault. A lot of people talk about it as a seller but majority of my slabs are personal collection.

I know people who have lost their whole collections because of a neighbors house fire and all sorts of random what if scenarios and it makes me want to have my collection somewhere safe and insured.

I probably have over 200 slabs all from my personal collection I would like somewhere safe, is the PSA vault the best option for this? I sell occasionally and will put some extra stuff to sell in the vault but my main reason is for keeping my collection safe and insured.

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I vote Fanatics for vault services. It feels like Fanatics was designed with collectors in mind while PSA’s vault service is hard to locate in the app (at least for me). The PSA app is smooth otherwise

Both services will keep your cards safe

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How do you know these people and what are the other random scenarios?

If you live in an area that’s prone to mishaps vaulting might be a good option for your pc. If you’re reading about these scenarios online I wouldn’t sweat it.

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I use both to hold PC purchases but only until it makes sense to ship a batch to myself. Fanatics customer support, transparency, and updates are much better. Their withdrawal fees are a bit more expensive for most slabs though since they take a % of appraised value fee vs a flat fee. Fanatics Vault withdrawal packaging is worse than PSA too. Prob. doesn’t matter as much if you’re going to keep them stored there for a while though. I prob lean towards Fanatics just for the better customer service since it seems you won’t be often shipping things back to yourself.

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Well I follow Jeremy P and saw him lose his collection in the Cali fires. Someone in my town recently had 30 units in their apt complex catch on fire because of an electrical issue in 1 unit. I just would rather know my stuff is safe and insured especially since I travel about 30% of the year.

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Throwing this in here but a safety deposit box is a nice alternative. A box that can hold 200+ cards cost me $50/year. I called a few banks around me and some were phasing these out

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Depends if they have humidity control etc.

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Safe deposit boxes are not “safe”, for a variety of reasons - search for other threads about this on E4.

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…thats using good common sense.

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Both ebay and Fantics vaults are likely safe. Someday you will want the cards withdrawn or sold. They simply won’t stay in the vault forever.

Comes down to this:

  • which vault has lower withdrawal and return shipping fees?
  • which vault has lower selling fees?
  • which vault provides a better experience while they are vaulted (such as viewing your cards electronically)
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My apologies. I misread your post and thought you were weighing the pros and cons of vaulting your pc in general. Hopefully my post didn’t come off as rude.

As far as PSA vault vs any other vault I haven’t seen any evidence that one his safer than the other. IMO it just comes down to cost and features that matter to you as @eeveeteam has noted.

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Both vaults are great.

PSA Vault allows you to sell directly to eBay and to receive offers from PSA’s network of dealers. That instant liquidity can come in handy if a big auction comes up.

Fanatics Collect Vault has pretty decent customer service and you can sell on Fanatics Collect.

Both vaults take a little bit of time to extract your cards for shipping, sometimes upwards of 10+ days. Fanatics Vault is quicker at intake by far in 2025. Fees are pretty reasonable at both vaults. Fanatics Vault is on the west coast and PSA Vault is on the east coast, so that geographic proximity may play a role in your decision.

I’ve used both since their inception and will never stop using them. Happy to answer specific questions if you have them.

Agreed with others that safe deposit boxes are a bad idea and I’ve written elsewhere on e4 why this may be.

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If you don’t want to look up the SDB threads the main cons are

  1. Not climate controlled
  2. Not insured
  3. Not accessible outside of banking hours
  4. No digital inventory management
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Note, PSA vault recently put up an alert that ingestion/withdrawal times are going up due to increased demand.

PSA pros:

  • You can drop off slabs to vault them at PSA events and not deal with shipping/insurance
  • Withdrawal is cheap (1.99 per card after 90 days in Vault). (Mostly a factor for high-end cards.)
  • High-end cards sell through the PSA vault very quickly. Fanatics, haven’t had any luck and get very few offers. I’m assuming this is b/c PSA/ebay gets more eyes.
  • Human support

Fanatics pros:

  • High-res photos (but don’t show surface imperfections well)
  • UI
  • Organization
  • Faster support (but poor quality)

My gripe with Fanatics is that I have an energy card with “thank you” written on it that I got charged to authenticate with CGC and cannot remove from my vault without paying. Customer support gave me canned responses and haven’t dealt with either aspect of it.

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personally ive never had an issue with psa vault support but ive mostly just contacted them to change ebay titles (which they do in like a couple hours) :rofl:

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