State of the Collection 2011 Retrospective

Well with the year winding down and no major releases I really care about till Series 1 Baseball comes out at the end of January, maybe it's time we take a look back at the year that was and how I did with my collecting goals for this year.  I posted my 2011 State of the Collection in early January this year.  You can read the whole post here.

I have to say for as sidetracked as I can get and as much as I was out of town and working this year I didn't do too bad.   Here's what my goals were for this year taken from that January post:

"My goals are pretty simple this year. After moving into my new house, I realize how much shit I have.
One of my goals is to consolidate and reduce my inventory of cards I don't want, through trades and selling.

I also put up my Yount collection at the Yount Collector and I'm slowly uploading scans of each card to photobucket and linking them to each card. I also plan to do the same thing with my Rollie Fingers collection and I hope that I can have that completed by the end of this year, taking my time so as not to get too overwhelmed.

Organize my Brewers and Packers Team sets.  One of my long term goals is to put together a Topps team set from 1971 to present.  I do believe I have 1971 complete so on to 1972!!! You can check out all the action once I set it up at Miles from Miller, my Brewers blog. I guess as a completist I would love to get a team set from every set but I'm just being reasonable.

I spent way too much money on cards in 2010 so I'll be scaling back a bit on boxes but I love to bust open a few packs of new stuff, so I won't deny myself that pleasure,  I think I'm probably going to try and complete the Kimball insert set in 2011 Baseball, I love mini's and inserts and retro so this is a no brainer, they'll go nice with my turkey red sets from 2009 and 2010."

Let's see how I did.  First consolidating and reducing.  Fail.  While I did complete a bunch of trades and sell off quite a few cards I still have way too much crap in the Man-Cave.  And while I've consolidated to a point, I still seem to be acquiring faster than I can get stuff out the door.  I love the posts some of you guys have of your card collections and they fit neatly into two boxes, are super organized, and very focused.  Not me. I wonder do all the extra cards I have from my set building and all the hits and other cards of players I don't collect count toward my collection?  

Next the Yount collection and the Rollie Fingers collection.  This one is split.  The Yount collection is still up to date.  I don't have scans of all the cards linked to the list, but at least the list is up to date.  I never did get around to getting the Rollie Fingers collection up at my Rollie Fingers blog, ah but there's always next year gotta pace yourself.

Next my Brewers and Packers team sets.  I'm in the middle here.  I've made great headway on the Brewers team sets.  I've pretty much got the 70's base Topps sets done.  I'm waiting on a few cards from COMC.  I'm waiting for the Black Friday shipping deal to ship them all.  I moved my Team set needs from my Brewers blog to this one for a few reasons.  One this blog gets a billion times more hits, so many  more eyeballs that might have cards to trade, and two I consolidated all the lists into one place instead of having a list for each card manufacturer.  I'm still horribly behind in getting my Packers organized.

Completing the Kimball Champions insert set.  I'm almost there, I'm almost there with my 2009 Turkey Red Insert set and I completed the 2010 Turkey Red insert set. Now I need to finish my Bowman Mini Football insert set.

Spend less.  Well I didn't keep good records, but with having a mortgage I know I spent way less then last year.  It helped that I didn't get sucked into Heritage this year.  I did however get sucked into Allen and Ginter, but I hit some major hits and I was able to sell off a bunch or stuff to help offset the cost.  The other nice thing was the I pretty much got a set out of each Jumbo box of Topps I opened this year so I didn't by a lot of random rack packs or other boxes.   I probably will get sucked into 2012 Heritage as I love the look of the 1963 Topps, so we'll have to see.

So in retrospect I had some minor successes with my goals this year, but there are some areas I could always improve.  I'll have my State of the Collection post up sometime in January.  I will say it's nice to have goals and to set goals. It's helped me in my collecting, not that I adhere to them, but it's nice to have a road map even if you don't use it.