My dad slowly gifted me all of this collections before he died. In 2005-2006 this included nearly 1000 boxes of books which he said was worth $250,000. He was a book dealer and these were his best and private books.
In 2011 He gave me his coin collection which was valued at $125,000 back in 2011 (it's worth about $66000 now because the price of silver has dropped).
His stamp collection has a catalog value of $175,000 but, with stamps (and coins to a letter degree) the Scott's catalog value is for insurance purposes and not what the stamps actually sell for. In reality the $175,000 stamp collection has a market value of only $12,000-15,000. Yes - stamp collection is that bad!
Since this is several huge collections it will take years to sell. I just held onto everything and figured it would be my retirement job to slowly sell these off. The fair-market-value was determined by my dad on the books since he was a dealer, the stamps were cataloged at the time and the coins basically went by the melt value of silver and gold at the time of the gifts.
Will I get charged for high taxes for selling these or since they were a gift can I legally use the FMV from my dad's estimate on the book collection? He didn't file anything with the IRS at the time of the gifting and there was not any cash gifts involved. It would not be possible to find what he paid for all these items as they were collected since from 1930s to 1980s and some items, such as the coins, were passed on to him when his parents died 30-40 years ago.
I'm wondering how this will be handled come tax time. I'm retired now and currently selling about $1000-$2000 a month (gross sales) on the old books. I am not buying anything to sell and everything I plan on selling were gifts from my dad.
