I had an eBay business while I was doing freelance work several years ago. I started eBay for one simple reason. I sell my Syquest Sparq drive and cartridges. Back in the late 90’s, the Iomega Jaz drive was the industry standard for backing up you data. They were great, but they cost a lot of money. The drive was around $400 and the 1GB cartridges were $100. 
I was really excited when Syquest came out the Sparq drive. You could get the drive for half the price of a Jaz and the cartridges were 3 for $100. I bought one the same week they came out on the market. They were running a design contest and the prize was 50 cartridges. Wow! With those I could get rid of all my 3.5 disks and a lot of my cd’s. To the drawing board! Digital, of course.
I entered 3 designs, and here’s the one that yielded me 50 of these amazing cartridges.
Yes, by today’s design standards, it’s lame, but it got me over $1,500 in digital storage. Sweet! As one of my friends said back then, I had enough of these to tile a small room. That was all great until these drive started having big time issues. The company replaced my drive at one point, but I already knew these were not going to last. I joined eBay, sold off my new, unopened replacement drive and all of the cartridges for just under $2,000. Before ceasing my good eBay business, I had done over 5,000 transactions and at several points, was a power seller.
So why the story? It reminded me of how value is placed on used items. Collectors items, which could be considered acceptable hoarding, used to be valued by large printed catalogs published once a year. When eBay became popular, that little statue your grandma gave you that was valued at $150 plummeted to about $10. Why? Supply and demand. The internet changed the availability of treasured stuff and the first people to list any type of anything got the big bucks. Then came the flood of those items, dropping the value, as they were a dime a dozen. Stuff is not an investment. If it was, I wou;d have been very wealthy before giving away and selling a lot of my things. It’s difficult to get rid of things when you paid a lot for it and it’s valued at a fraction of the original price. This is a good thing to keep in mind when making a purchase of any type. In a year, if this [whatever] is valued at 5-10% of the original cost, will that bother me? Will I still be using it?
Here’s the photo I found that made me think of how we place value on our things.
It’s an original Joan Miro painting and this is after hurricane Andrew. The other one blew into the lake behind the house. Now, of course, if you can afford an original Miro painting, you clearly would have it well insured. To me, this is a portrait of reality. A worldly possession, protected with UV glass, ornamentally framed into a beautiful showpiece, waiting… For what? For one missed paycheck, being sold to survive or one disaster, being shattered into pieces. I remember the owner taking the painting out of the frame and trying to clean it up and dry it, but even then, the monetary value was gone. The owners had a lot of nice things, but I don’t ever remember them being upset about this, or similar things they lost in the storm. I don’t know how I would react to loosing a lot of my things, or all of it, but it’s definitely something to think about.