For those who use spreadsheets..

[Jurgy25]

Thanks guys, I think I've got it.

 

[All The Hype]

Question for you guys,
If you acquire a card by trade, what do you put as the buy in price?

Price you paid for the card you traded. If that isn't available, take the current sell value of the card you are acquiring.

Hypothetically, I think you would want the current sell value of anything you are giving up, as that is basically what you could have had in value had you sold these cards rather than trade them.

For example, if you get a trade that favors you...say you trade away current SV of $50 to get a card of current SV $100 (for whatever reason)...then you would have to put down that you "paid" or gave up $50 for the card you are bringing in.

It's interesting because either way, you're not actually putting any more money into your investing when you trade, so there may be a better way altogether, but this is what I have done to this point and I am happy enough with it.

 

[bballcardkid]

If you want your accounting to be 100% accurate when your doing a trade, the card you are trading for should have a recorded value of the buy in cost of the card you gave up. It makes no sense to do otherwise.

Example:

I trade X for Y. X cost me $50. Y is WORTH $80, but I record it on the spreadsheet as $50, because that's what I have in it. I don't record it at $80 because I didn't pay $80 for it and I didn't trade something that cost me $80. That is the only accurate way to do it.


I also don't like doing the auto subtraction because it messes everything up. I record every card, not just the ones I've sold, so I don't want my profit margin to say arbitrarily ($75) in red showing that I basically gave the card away. Sure it will change when I do sell it, but I want to check the status of my total columns on demand. Doing the auto subtraction fugdes the numbers.

 

[All The Hype]

If you want your accounting to be 100% accurate when your doing a trade, the card you are trading for should have a recorded value of the buy in cost of the card you gave up. It makes no sense to do otherwise.

Example:

I trade X for Y. X cost me $50. Y is WORTH $80, but I record it on the spreadsheet as $50, because that's what I have in it. I don't record it at $80 because I didn't pay $80 for it and I didn't trade something that cost me $80. That is the only accurate way to do it.


I also don't like doing the auto subtraction because it messes everything up. I record every card, not just the ones I've sold, so I don't want my profit margin to say arbitrarily ($75) in red showing that I basically gave the card away. Sure it will change when I do sell it, but I want to check the status of my total columns on demand. Doing the auto subtraction fugdes the numbers.

I like having the auto subtraction because it gives me a realistic total for what I actually have at any moment in time. If the card market were to go to hell overnight and everything had value of $0 tomorrow, I would know exactly how much I had made or lost on individual cards and overall. It's a good tool IMO to know exactly where you stand if you had to liquidate everything, for whatever reason, in a hurry.

Definitely can't hurt to have extra information.

 

[bballcardkid]

Huh? If I do the fill, I get nothing informative

If I don't do the fill, and I manually subtract the columns, which isn't tedious, I can find out anything I need to know

Column D total- total I've spent on baseball cards. DOH ::facepalm:: lol
Column E total- total I've sold
Column F total- total profit before fees
Column G total- total paypal fees
Column H total- total ebay fees
Column I- net profit

I can also figure out the total buy in price of the cards I currently have on hand by doing the following math

Column D - (Column E - Column F) = Total buy in price of cards on hand

Doing that shows that of all the cards I have on hand, I've spent a little under $8K. :shock:

 

[EricInCT]

I just finished fine tuning my spreadsheet if anyone is still looking for one or wants to compare. It is excel, hit me up.

E