topic sale of trading cards in Self employed

sale of trading cards

undividedattention — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 05:40:03 GMT

Hi,

In the past year, I have purchased a lot of boxes of baseball cards. I have then taken some of these and listed them online for sale. I will get a 1099 as a result. My question is around basis. Let's say I bought 100 boxes at $10/box. Each box contained 10 cards. That's 1000 cards, for $1000, suggesting that each card has a basis of $1. However, 99% of the cards are not worth anything tangible. The 1% that are, I sell online. Let's say I get $10K total for the 10 cards I sell. Since the other 990 cards are not worth the cost of selling, can I use the entire $1000 as the basis for the 10 cards?

Re: sale of trading cards

RSUMan — Wed, 31 Aug 2022 22:24:30 GMT

When you buy a box of baseball cards, you pay $XXX. Then, you review the cards you purchased in that box and allocate the $XXX you spent to the cards in that box. So if you have one Mickey Mantle and one Roger Maris in the box and the rest are players who played 5 games in the Majors and never got a hit, you allocate YY% of $XXX to Mickey and ZZ% of $XXX to Roger. You are using the relative fair market value of the asset to allocate your cost (which we hope is a bargain purchase) to the assets you purchased. My friend had a wonderful tee shirt: I was a Millionaire until my Mother threw out my Baseball Cards!