"advice for selling deceased friend's collection?" Topic

Ive been contacted by the spouse of a deceased friend about selling off his collection of history/sci-fi stuff.

Looking for suggestions on best handling it.

TIA,
Madcam.

My condolences to your friends Widow…

Depending on what she wants for them (to just get rid of them or to make a killing off them), Nobel Knights will purchase the entire lot. You can contact them for more information.

If you live near a larger convention that has a flea market or Dealer hall, see about getting space there….

Dave

It all depends on how much she is needing to be realized from the sale of the items. To get top dollar will take time and a lot of effort. This would involve listing items on a myriad of websites, such as Ebay or Bartertown, in addition to hitting as many gaming conventions as you can to sell at the Flea Market or purchasing a Dealer table(s).
To do a friends collection, I held a couple of "sale" days for the local gaming group, attended two different conventions over the course of a couple of years using the flea markets and dealer space. My friend had a tremendous amount of stuff. I made many "deals" so good people that were interested couldn't turn them down. I often tried to sell large batches of games and figures. Example, board games are $10 USD but if you buy 3 I'll give you a forth one free. I generated a fair amount of money for his wife, more than if I just sold the lot to Noble Knight, but it took me 4-5 years to do it.

I'll second Noble Knight

Local conventions will usually sell you a table. It does take time. On this site there is a place to list the items for sale.

Good luck! I'm currently working on my fourth or fifth such project. Much depends on scale, period and basing.

You should certainly contact his other friends. You may find some of them need terrain or opposition armies they've been using right along.

As noted, Noble Knight will buy much or all, but is not always your best price, especially considering shipping costs. They work best with items which can be identified right down to manufacturer and catalog number. If you use them, exercise extreme care in packing large items and bases with multiple figures--especially in the larger scales.

OMM will probably take the books, but a local used book dealer eliminates the shipping cost.

For small unidentified items, magazines, scratch-builts, bulky terrain and conversions, I'd recommend a flea market. Any chance you can make it to FALL IN? You can sell ANYTHING at a Lancaster convention.

Once you've done friends, local buyers, national buyers and flea markets--probably in more or less that order--look over the residue and write the widow a check for it. Then it will be over. Sell or bin the leftovers, or integrate them into your own forces, but don't drag out matters with her by telling her you'll try again at next year's flea market.

And again, good luck!

Could try here in the Marketplace (but then you need to be a member), FACEBOOK has a number of pages for the sale of wargaming items, Bartertown is another site…also, Lead Adventure forum also has a for sale page.

Might be worth looking into auctioneers too. I'm lucky enough to live a few miles from one in England that runs periodic toy auctions. Games Workshop particularly seems to sell well attracting many online bidders.

The upside is that the auction house handles photography, letting, selling, shipping etc. The downside is that they'll charge a seller's commission. Roughly 20% in the case of my local one.

In your position, I'd probably let his friends and club mates have first refusal with the rest going to auction.

Sounds like one has been going on here for a few turns. Comes up every now and then selling by the pound.

There was a woman here in Denver that was posting full boxes on eBay. They sold quite well, however, it was a lot of work.

As noted, Noble Knight will buy much or all, but is not always your best price, especially considering shipping costs

Noble Knight pays shipping costs

Ship Your Items or Drop Off In-store
*WE PAY SHIPPING COST. We will email you Fedex labels to put on each box. We will pay the shipping costs – unless otherwise noted – if you follow our shipping guidelines outlined below on this page.

As stated above, there are several Facebook Marketplace groups for board war-games, WH40K stuff, miniatures, etc. There's no fees and you certainly get a dedicated audience who are interested in what you have to offer.

I have sold just one box of stuff to Noble Knight. I would describe the transaction as ideal. That's probably plan A. Note that they will pay more in credit than in cash, so if the widow needs money you could help her arbitrage that.

Plan B is to donate what they will take to a game convention. Many have game libraries that accept such donations, and they will sell what they can't use at the flea market for the benefit of the con. If there's a con the deceased cared about this could be great. It does not bring in any money, though.

Plan C is to sell it at a convention flea market. I've sold stuff this way many times and it's a lot of work. A lot. It's fun, and you make some money, but it's a lot of hauling. I like standing behind the table and talking to people about things, I do not enjoy the hauling.

After that you're doing eBay or Etsy postings, lots of photographing, describing, answer questions, packaging, and shipping. I don't like this kind of work. If you don't mind it in the long run this will be the most remunerative. But it assumes you can store things until a buyer appears and have the time to prepare and maintain all those listings. After a year maybe you take whatever's left to one of the other options.

Good luck!

Good advice. The size of the collection, the age of the figures, and how organized it is are important. Guys who try to get top dollar have their friend's stuff for a long time. Also, no one is going to pay you top dollar for 30 year old 25mm Minifigs. If it were me, I'd price to sell and hit up local gamers, this site, and some facebook sites. I wouldn't consider most cons unless I was planning on attending anyway. If you have some identifiable gems, ebay might be the way to go with those. Otherwise, try to move product cheap and in bulk.

Sorry for your loss.

My error and my apolgies, Marc33954. Either they've changed or I remembered them backward.

Might be worth remembering that the IRS is now tracking PayPal and Etsy transactions down to $600 USD a year for goods and services. You ought to be able to avoid the taxes, but I'm pretty sure someone's going to be stuck with the paperwork.

Perhaps start with a very simple list of what there is and gauge interest – some areas will attract more interest then others – particularly in the local level

This makes me wish we had auction type board on TMP.

I have friends who have recently gone through this exercise. It has taken a while (I bought a fair bit myself) probably six months or more in total.
They basically put out lists of what was available on Facebook pages, turned up to local conventions, and sent out emails to relevant groups.
But it will take patience. Good luck.

It may be worth it to post the lists on the TMP marketplace board.

Noble Knight, I just took part in their fall trade in event.

Estate liquidation is not something I would want to do for 30% and any more does not seem friendly

If you just want to get rid of it Noble Knight is the best option, but expect a lowball offer at best.

Beyond that selling at conventions or through the TMP marketplace might be more lucrative.

Somebody CHARGES for this? Friends and widows of friends? I took 10% from a friend once, because he was still alive and insisted.

First rule of cleaning up after your dead friends and getting money to the widow: this is a money-losing proposition. If you're lucky, you get most of your expenses back. (You will get first crack at things, of course, and all the completely unsaleable stuff left over. I'm still trying to unload some 25mm mounted archers for which I wrote the widow a check maybe two-three years ago.)

If a friend needed to get to the hospital, you wouldn't ask for mileage money. If a friend is dead or otherwise beyond wargaming, you clean up the wargaming estate for his widow. If you think you should be paid for this, give her the phone number of an estate company. Otherwise, your goal is to strike the best balance for her between money (and an empty garage) right now and more money later. A percentage for yourself is business, not friendship.

When my best mate of 40+ years died I took control of his wargame collections.

It took 14 car journeys to recover his stuff back to my place. That took the car boot (trunk) to roof level, rear passenger seats including footwells and front passenger seat and footwell.

Every figure/unit that was table ready was cleaned up, boxed, advertised/displayed at several club/home meetings/bring&buy/fleamarket and sold, generally for a good price.

Every figure/unit that was part finished was completed and disposed of as above.

Every figure/unit that wasn't even started was painted and based and disposed as above.

These procedures took the best part of two years and raised over £10,000.00 GBP which was spread over a number of charities.

I got a £100.00 GBP thank you from the family which I used to buy some more stuff which I sold for a further charitable contribution.

That's what every wargamer with a deceased buddie should be doing with his collections.

All,

thanks for the advise.

And R. Piepenbeck, like you, this service will be gratis and tribute to a friend i'll not play with again this side of the bridge. We made a pact long ago, whomever went first, the other would take this burden off the others wife.

Madcam.

Lost my dear friend almost two years ago and I and others are helping his wife part with his stuff. His miniatures he mostly gave away to friends. They are hard to sell. We've had mixed success selling his rules and board games. She's trying to avoid Noble Knight, but it may come down to that in the end simply for convenience.

In many areas, people run businesses selling items consigned to them on EBay for a 50-50 split. When you consider the time and money required to handle the sales yourself, it may be worth it. Wonder if anyone has tried this?

Wonder if anyone has tried this?

Estate Liquidation is a legit business and many people do it with varying degrees of quality, obviously.

50% of the gross sales is common.

Noble Knight is happy to buy your stuff, but it definitely is not going to be top, or even mid-dollar value. If you're priority is to move everything in bulk due to time constraints, there are buyers, but be prepared expect $3 USD-5 per game as a bulk offer. If you have the luxury of time, ConSimWorld, Boardgamegeek, and eBay (in that order) have all proven to be good options.

@Robert P.

While I am the 1st to confess that I do not comprehensively understand the tax rules re eBay, I think the $600 USD floor/ceiling has been poorly explained by the IRS.

Once upon a time there was no need to account for monies received from eBay sales. Then, some years ago, there were rumblings that Congress, (God love 'em), had enacted a law requiring that the IRS start taxing money received from 3rd party collection entities including PayPal payments and eBay sales. They established a 200 transactions/$20,000 threshold. Everybody, (me included) understood that as long as you stayed below the threshold, you owed nothing.

Au contraire. These thresholds were the cutoffs for the collectors to have to report to the IRS. Exceed the limits and the IRS would be notified of your "income." This muddle abtained for several years. Things got squirrely when Congress dropped the threshold to $600 USD for reporting. A low rumble of buzz went rippling as people finally started really figuring this all out.

Things at the IRS were such a shambles they deferred reporting for the first year, but many 3rd party payers were ahead of the game and reported anyway, sending out 1099K forms.

There are a dizzying array of exceptions and special circumstances that can be exploited to limit one's tax liability, but at bottom, you owe tax on what the 3rd party payor declares you received, less expenses. You owe/owed the taxes all the way back to when Congress got involved (in theory), but nobody's going back to revisit this.

Ebay declares you received EVERYTHING the buyer paid, except money collected to pay Sales Taxes. For almost all deals this comes to (Declared$ – eBay Fees – Shipping$). I never offer Free Shipping so I don't know how that works.

You wind up having to include additional forms with your return. This whole kerfuffle is a big plus to in person cash sales.

There is a silver lining to this. Friend IRS gets these 1099Ks and if your return doesn't jibe they gotta get in touch. I gotta figure there's a ton load of Maalox getting chugged at IRS land over this.

:》

IRS would be notified of your "income."

That gets tricky when you sell items as a favor. It's actually the estate's income, not yours. I think the eBay account would need the correct Tax ID.

I've been ebay'ing surplus stuff for a friend for a while now. I keep 10% of the net and declare the sales as mine and pay the taxes due. Not all that much in the grand scheme of things.

I go over his house about once a month and he treats to pizza. Seems about right.

Exeter, that's pretty much what I said: you may be able to avoid paying money--or any serious amount of money--but you will have to generate enough paperwork to satisfy the IRS. Often I'd rather pay money than fill out forms, but that option does not seem to be available. It's either paperwork and money, or just paperwork.

Meantime, someone e-mailed me about the mounted archers, and I accidentally deleted the e-mail. Try again please? They're free and I'll pay postage.

The first year I got a 1099K it was for only about 3 months worth of sales, so I listed 100% of what ebay said I owed tax on, (wrong) because I couldn't stomach the idea of trying to sort out the accounting.

The next year I was on the hook for some serious coin, so I had to.

My advice would try and do a convention flea market. People see what they are getting, you don't have the hassle of packing things up, and most use cash for payment.

Nobel Knight is probably the most convenient for purchasing, however, they'll give you rock bottom in return.
I do understand they are a business and need to make money, just offering my .02.

Ten years or so ago, a guy in our local area who collected board wargames died. His wife contacted the local game store, and they arranged to sell off the collection, either with her getting half, and the store getting half, or giving her 30% of what the store manager estimated he would get by selling off the collection. The guy they contracted with to do the selling (me) got store credit for a percentage of the sale prices.

Some items were listed on specialty sites (Board Game Geek and another board wargaming forum) and others on E-Bay. All were locally advertised on the stores website and most were sold at the store's semi-annual auction event. The rest were taken to conventions and sold at the store's table there.

Or, to put it another way, some items were easy to sell, others took longer to find a buyer for.

A few brought in top dollar, some of them went for bargain prices, and many of them went for prices somewhere in between. A few things ended up being given away (as prizes or bonuses), simply to free up the shelf space in the back of the store.

You may want to try this kind of multi-step approach, if you have the time, energy, and storage space. If you are in a group or club, perhaps other members would help you – particularly if they are expert in areas you are not (i.e. digital photos, or knowledge of a specific historical period or sci-fi system)

I believe that the widow took the cash in hand offer ($2-3k iirc), but would have made a bit more (a total of over $4 USDk, as the total sales were around $9 USDk – which was more than the store owner, widow, and I estimated) had she taken the 50/50 split. But it did take over a year and a half to sell it all off, so getting the cash up front and the games out of her home (she sold her house and moved to a smaller home, near to her children and grandchildren) was better for her.

Do you have a local shop that would do something similar – or even a local gaming group that would take on the project with you?

Like many senior wargamers, I have of late been reducing my huge collections of painted and unpainted minis. It takes a long time to sell on ebay, Facebook pages etc. Some treasured items I found nobody wanted and had to end up sending to landfill as the local club was already overloaded with items. In 3 years I have managed to sell, donate, or landfill about 50% (about half a single garage full). I think with deceased estates, it will depend what the items are. Games Workshop always seem to sell, board games, not so much, well painted good minis (not too old) much better than unpainted loose minis, but it will take alot of time to dispose of a reasonable estate. A fellow gamer, has a huge series of sheds holding deceased wargame estates, which he charges a 30% commission for sales as it is his business.