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Purging for a move - sales advice wanted


Chuck Nessa

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We will be leaving our house in the next 18 months (estimation) and we have been here since 1984. We have absorbed my parents stuff, Ann's parents stuff and our own considerable accumulations.  

I have begun thinning my classical cd collection and am now well over 500 discs.

I am looking for suggestions to make this as easy as possible / balanced against getting screwed.

Any suggestions from folks going through this sort of thing?

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You might try posting some of them here. I'm sure there are more than a few classical fans among us.

I don't know how much classical sells on Discogs, but that may be worth a shot.

Decluttr.com buys a lot of CDs, though like Dusty Groove, they have to be in flawless condition. Prices they pay vary greatly, but they do provide prepaid shipping if you sell them 10+ CDs.

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2 hours ago, David Ayers said:

When seliing jazz I have placed items worth over £25 on amazon (just about worth packing and taking to post office) and sold the rest to a store. Classical generally aren't worth much though, as you know. 

You mean you wouldn't want to bother packing and shipping any item that wouldn't yield you at least 25 quid? :blink: My my ....

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I'm probably in the market for some of your classical culls, but I suspect that compiling a list might be too tedious for you.

It's obvious no doubt, but selling rare-valuable stuff to a store for what it's worth requires that the store knows what's valuable and is honest with you about that. In my experience, neither of those factors (especially the first) necessarily applies, though one can get lucky. I've seen items I've sold and gotten a pittance for and then the next day they're priced for as much as $50. When I asked what was going on here, I was told that the store doesn't necessarily expect to get that price but decides to give it a try. I know -- I shouldn't sell things there, but options in my area are nil, E-Bay has no appeal to me, and sometimes the purchaser at the store is more generous. It all depends, in my experience, of who that person who buys things on that day is.

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Speaking of poor hearing, if that description still applies, high quality hearing aids these days can bring near miraculous results (they did for me; about seven years ago I thought my listening days might be over -- had a big high-frequency hearing loss, the result of aging alone). They now have individualized computer programs for each ear's hearing aid (programs determined by the examining audiologist and readily adjustable  later on by the audiologist if you're not entirely satisfied with the results). In the case of my hearing aids (Siemens) there are separate programs for music and for speech, as well as controls (in an ap that's on my phone) that allow you to adjust bass and treble, volume, and how wide or narrow the spectrum of sounds are that one is taking in (this helps some if you're  trying to talk to someone in a bar, though separating foreground from background noise is something that hearing aids, as least at this point, can't do).

 Really good hearing aids are pricey, but if you itemize medical deductions on your tax returns, the price of hearing aids is deductible. Also, as far as looks matter, most good hearing aids these days are visible only if someone is looking for them, and even then... Speaking of price, I know people who say that they've had good luck at Costco, but I didn't happen to go that route, in part because I wasn't then aware of that option. IIRC, Costco's good prices are in part because they don't sell the top-line manufacturers' current models but those from prior years, which nonetheless can be quite good. Not having dealt with Costco myself, except for all the stuff I normally buy there, I'd want to be sure  (if I could be) that their audiologists at a particular store  are really good and willing to spend as much time with you as needs be. I went to the Northwestern U. Audiology Clinic and was very satisfied until my excellent audiologist there left and was replaced by jerks. I migrated to an outfit called Hear U.S.A. and have been happy ever since. 

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I was faced with a similar quandary when I downsized in the move from Kansas City to Washington DC back around 2010-11.

(Not a solution for you, Chuck, I totally realize.)

But we had a house we had to get shaped up and put on the market in MUCH shorter order than I would have ever guessed.  (My wife decided to start throwing her hat in the ring for DC-based jobs with the Federal department she's worked for, for ~25 years now.  She thought it would take 1-2 years before the she got selected for a job that was also a good fit for her (maybe even 3 years?).  About a week or so later, out of the blue a job came up that she thought sounded like a good halfway match, which she interviewed for 2 weeks later, got selected for another week later, and then 2 weeks after that she was in DC -- so barely 5-6 weeks after the initial decision just to start looking, she was gone!).

So I was faced with downsizing and packing up a 3BR (arguably 4BR) house, so it could all fit in a small 625 sq-ft 1BR apartment, and had to repaint 70% of the interior of the entire house, and get the exterior repainted (which I didn't dare attempt myself - 2 story house), and a whole bunch of other stuff I won't get into the details of.  All while working, and while my wife was already in DC.

So I "hired" all my under-employed jazz musician buddies to come over and help me pack everything up, and they helped me paint practically the entire house (interior), and I "paid" them in used CD's -- as many as they wanted -- from what I was ditching to cut my collection in half.  Ultimately got rid of about 3-4 thousand CD's (still kept close to 4,000).  But it was worth EVERY penny I theoretically "lost" by not trying to sell the stuff outright.  Got TONS of help packing and moving, and fixing up the house, and loading the moving van even.

Would have been a nightmare to try and sell all that stuff on-line, and I wouldn't have gotten more than $.75 per disc trying to sell it to any of the used CD places in town (well more than half of which had closed their doors in the preceding 5 years), to say nothing of the time it would have taken.

Good deal all around, for everyone, I think.  LOTTA nice guys I knew got a lot of good music out of it, and I was quite happy for all the help.

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When I moved from a home to a small apartment, I had no particular desire to sell my collection just yet. I had not enough room in the new apartment to hold my LPs, CDs, books and magazines. It was not even close.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that one can rent climate controlled, secure, clean storage units for under $250 a month. That is what I did, and still do. I put all of my collections into this off-site storage unit. I thought I would not like it, having my music miles away. I would not be able to roll out of bed and grab a particular album on a whim. I found that I like it all right. I go to my storage unit regularly and get music out of it.

You might do that until you decide what to do with everything, if you are going to have storage space issues in your new home. That buys you time to figure things out.

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1 hour ago, rostasi said:

Amoeba Music sends people out nationwide to look at collections
and I've heard they pay well. He's already shown interest in mine.

I would like to learn more about Amoeba Music's purchases. My daughter is my sole heir and wants nothing to do with my collection. I may have to set up a sale to someone like Amoeba Music at some point.

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1 hour ago, soulpope said:

If funds should not be a main issue would consider a donation to a library - so people interested in hearing the music can do so ....

Many (all?) libraries are very picky about what they take. The several large batches of CDs I donated to my local library ended up being sold for 25-50 cents each at the library's big fundraising sale. They didn't keep any of them for their music shelves. Apparently, there is very little interest from their patrons in them having a large Jazz CD collection.

Just an idea... I was recently given ~2,000 big band/Dixieland  CDs after a co-worker of my wife inherited them from her grandfather. She heard that "Kevin likes Jazz". I didn't know what to do with them (they were not my style) so I donated them a local nursing home where they have apparently been enthusiastically well received.

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3 hours ago, soulpope said:

Interesting - in continental Europe this is not the rule ....

I am afraid it is the rule not all that rarely. Unless you happen to stumble upon a library that is severely understocked AND wants to add to its range in that particular field that you happen to want to get rid off. A very rare occurrence, unfortunately ...

In fact I have heard about such sell-offs too (after the fact, of course ...). Lending libraries these days have a pretty fast turnover even of those items they stock for their customers and of  what they discard as "no longer up to date" (read: perceived as being no longer in demand and blocking valuable space for more in-demand items that attract those who still go to these libraries). The days (such as in my youth in the 70s) when you were able to pick up long-OOP books from local/suburb libraries on historical subject matters that were of interest to you (e.g. books published as long back as the 50s that were still on the shelves all through the 70s and early 80s) are long, long over, unfortunately. You really have to go to larger, archive-minded libraries these days to peruse or borrow "historical" tomes. So you can imagine what their "life cycle" and turnover in the media field is these days ... ;)

Edited by Big Beat Steve
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It costs literally nothing to donate what you have, but the costs of storing and cataloging are very high. And donors are not usually offering to meet those in perpetuity even if anyone wanted our old tat. The reason for ditching CDs is very often the space costs, which trump the notional value of the collection even to the collector her or himself. 

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17 hours ago, Hot Ptah said:

When I moved from a home to a small apartment, I had no particular desire to sell my collection just yet. I had not enough room in the new apartment to hold my LPs, CDs, books and magazines. It was not even close.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that one can rent climate controlled, secure, clean storage units for under $250 a month. That is what I did, and still do. I put all of my collections into this off-site storage unit. I thought I would not like it, having my music miles away. I would not be able to roll out of bed and grab a particular album on a whim. I found that I like it all right. I go to my storage unit regularly and get music out of it.

 

And when will your lock-up unit come up on "STORAGE WARS" on TV, then? Might make for some interesting watching ...:lol:

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2 hours ago, mjazzg said:

Personal collections don't often reflect the required profile of public library provision.Certainly so fifteen years or so ago when I was on the receiving end of well intentioned donations.

True. Not only in the field of music. At the end of the 90s my father tried to reduce his considerable library of architecture books (the result of a long professional life in that field and of hoarding books on this subject - a habit I "unfortunately" have inherited in my fields of interest :D). Libraries did not show much interest and even antiquarians would have required him beforehand to draft a detailed listing of what exactly he had (as did the libraries). Neither of the two groups of potential recipients seemed to have been prepared to send someone over to have a closer look for assessment.

The final result? Some of the more run of the mill stuff and/or more recent books were given to former students of his (free, of course), and the rarer/older/more collectible ones made it into my crates of fleamarket/garage sale stuff. I made some pretty decent money from those I have sold over time. As for the antiquarians - their loss .... I remember when I sold off a bunch of his more collectible 20s/30s books to a lady who turned out to run an antique bookshop specializing in architecture books herself. Musing over her finds at my stall she seemed to be truly dumbfounded by what she had discoverd there and asked me outright "Which estate did these books come from?", obviously meaning (without being that forthright) "Books like this are not supposed to end up with private sellers who might sell them directly to private buyers - they are supposed to go directly from the estate to professional sellers who can make a maximum of benefit from them". Ha, lady, your loss, and not true anyway - remember the saying: " Avoid the middleman"! :g

So, Chuck ... while CDs are not that collectible, of course, how about participating in an occasional neighborhood garage sale first and make some happy buyers? You can still donate the leftovers elsewhere of call in one of the shops later on.

Edited by Big Beat Steve
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