Goals For 2018, Grades For 2017

Yup, new year, new goals and new grades to dish out.

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2017 Grades

5. Go Three Weeks Without Buying Cards Per Month

F. This goal was doable for like the first few months of the year. Then, well, you all saw how the number of Torrens posts I made went up right?

4. Monthly Limit for Card Purchases

F. Forgot to set limits for pretty much the entire year.

3. Acquire Autographs of The Ghost crew

F. I got the Kanan Jarrus (Freddie Prinze Jr.) autograph and that was it. Zeb (Steve Blum) remains at large.

2. Downsize My Yankees Collection

C-. I did manage to get rid some Yankees thanks to Twitter contests I held (yup, I'll hold contests but I won't participate in them) and a yearly donation to The Lost Collector Card Institute, so now I have significantly less. I gave myself a barely passing grade because I'm still left with way too many prospect cards that I'm going to have to sort out and do something about before they drown me in my sleep.

1. Create a Definitive and Cohesive List of Players I'm collecting

D. All I did was create a list of foreign/non-Japanese players who've played for the Chunichi Dragons, only to forget about it by April. That's not good enough.

Yikes, what a horrible report card. Almost mirrors the one I got this past semester (which was much worse mind you). Ugh!

But that was that, now to see what's next.

2018 Goals

5. Get to 10 Bowman Chrome Luis Torrens base autographs

In 2017 I actually picked up a few Torrens BoChro autographs for fairly cheap. After realizing that I might as well take advantage of a market I've been looking for years, I made it to eight Torrens BoChro autos. My goal is to pick up at least two more of these base autographs. Not to be all "hoarding prospector" like, but because it pleases me to see like an array of the same card while knowing that they're all autographed for some reason.

4. Get to 10 Filip Chytil Young Guns Rookies

Okay, for this goal I'm going full prospector hoarder mode. Because I want to be the crazy guy who amasses a fairly large collection of the same card. What better than a promising New York Rangers rookie who figures to be a key part of the Rangers' center depth going forward? Two down, eight more to go.

3. Zero Boxes or Full Priced Blaser Boxes

Since early 2015 I've had a decent streak going where I stay away from opening any hobby boxes or blaster boxes at full value. It wasn't until my 2017-18 Upper Deck Hockey break that the streak ended (even then I got a $5 discount) but meh, it was fun. Still, with baseball products becoming increasingly predictable and not quite up to snuff anymore, I think I'll go back to passing on buying boxes. Same goes for blasters, unless they're heavily discounted.

2. No More Card Shows

If all I'm going to do is complain about them, then I might as well stop going :P. Besides, I can always mail in cards to get signed if I wanted to (and I might actually).

1. BUDGET

Alright, no more fooling around. Time to go back to penny pinching mode. Every time I set an arbitrary limit to how much I can spend for myself, I create excuses and exploit loopholes. So I'm going back to my old "no buying cards for six months" thing. I came close to completing it in 2016, I have hopes that 2018 will be the same.

EDIT: Allow me to add an addendum here. If I do purchase something in one of the six other months, I can only spend $50 during those months. Max.

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With that, those are my goals for the new year that is upon us. Wish me luck. I hope you all have the best of luck with your goals too.

As always thanks for stopping by and take care :).