the ongoing disbursement saga

ad4400

For those of you that are regular readers of these boards, you're probably familiar with my efforts to disburse an inheritance that has sat in a closet for the last 30 years. Unfortnately, it consists mostly of mint sheets and plate blocks from 1940 - 1977. I've confirmed through a couple of sources that the collector value is less than face, so in an effort to at least get face I thought of selling at face to co-workers and friends. I've made my first serveral sales and figure that will be a good way of getting rid of the 13 and perhaps 10 cent stamps, but after that it becomes much less practical to load up envelopes with the required number of stamps.

Leg two of my disbursement strategy was to trade for stamps I needed in my collection. My first effort, and I haven't given up, ended in failure this weekend, when a local dealer had no interest in trading single commemoratives for single commemoratives. Guess what I need to find is collectors with over stuffed stockbooks instead of dealers.... btw I've soured on this particular dealer - he also sells coins and my first ill advised purchases of cleaned/altered coins came from him. I also had a piece of currency from the estate - he offered me $50 for what I later that day got $70.

So that is where I am with the saga. I'll keep posting if people continue to express interest. Thanks to all those that have either given me guidance or expressed interest in the materials so far.

Alain

UncleWiggly

Please keep posting. You want to give us the name of the dealer? PM? Also, please keep keeping us informed. I'm still looking for a sheet of the Texas stamps....can't remember the Scott nr. right now.



Jerry

edueku

Gary Posner has been advertising in Linn's to buy to buy the old 3c commemoratives(1935-1958) at 5c a piece. also 909-921,859-893, c25-c31. Their Phone # to call is 1-800-323-4279

ad4400

As an update on my little project, I'm just about done with creating an Excel inventory of the sheets and plate blocks. The spreadsheet is already over 400 lines long and I still have a couple of legal size pages of hand written notes to key into the list. From there I hope to create trade, and potentially sell lists. I got the 2006 Harris catelog as a birthday gift, and have further confirmed that the vast majority of the material is very low value common material.

My lastest idea/hope is to find collectors who would want to trade plate blocks of common materials from the 1940s-70s for a couple of individual, MHH, stamps of the same era. Sales of the $.13 cent stamps to co-workers at face is mostly complete. I think the $.10 stamps are going to be a harder sell.

In any event I'll keep everyone abreast, hope to post to the inventory to BST board, and may very well have further questions as to what to do with this stuff.

After I have the wheels set in motion on some sort of dispostion of the US materials, there is also a substantial amount of foriegn material I'll need to figure out. I've already seen several posts about going to the local library to get the Scott catelogue, which sounds like a good starting point. In 1977 the foriegn portion of the collection was appraised at roughly $1.5K, so one way or another (EBay, dealers, board memebers) I hope to sell these.