Goals for 2020, Grades for 2019

新年明けましておめでとうございます！今年もよろしくお願いします！

Happy New Year everybody. Thank you all for coming on this trip that I call a blog with me for what's been six whole years now. Woof, time flies. Anyway, here's my annual review of how I messed up in 2019 and how I hope I can mess up less in 2020.

2019 Goals

6. Get to 20 Bowman Chrome Luis Torrens base autographs

A

Got to 20 BoChro autos around late June/early July.

5. Go a whole month without buying any baseball cards

A

In February I managed to go an entire month without buying baseball cards. I bought other cards but they weren't baseball. #loopholes

4. $50 budget cap per month (Except August)

F-

Ugh.

3. Keep it to two blaster boxes (at most) for the year

A

On March 31st, I bought a blaster box of 2019 Stripes & Stars. I was very tempted to buy another blaster of something at various points of the year but I never went through with it. Something about spending $20 on a single box just made me very uneasy. I came close to buying an Elite Extra Edition blaster at Target the other day before I saw that it was 5 cards for $20. FIVE CARDS FOR TWENTY DOLLARS. I don't care how many autographs are guaranteed in those five cards because unless I'm getting Jasson Dominguez that shit can fuck right off.

2. Reach 100+ TTMs

A

Took a while but I managed to reach 100 TTMs in October.

1. Keep Blogging

A

Not to toot my own horn but I think I managed to maintain a consistent blogging pace by posting double-digit entries every month and I usually blogged every Monday-Wednesday-Friday with some occasional mini/joke posts sandwiched in on random Tuesdays or Thursdays. The infusion of my new 3 Cards series really helped and now that I've expanded the interests I have that I want to share on this blog to include other sports, porn and music now, the sky's the limit.

Unrelated Scan 1

In terms of goal completion rate,  5/6 isn't terrible. However that budget issue looms large in my head and if I were to weigh these in importance it feels like I really accomplished 0.26/6 of my goals. Which brings me to the...

2020 Goals

6. One Card In, 15 Cards Out

The 6th extra goal has become a fixture now.

I managed to purge a ton of cards in 2019 either by trades or by throwing them into the trash, and going forward the idea is to make sure I never accumulate close to a 1,000 cards I send out to Gavin in a Priority Box. As such I'm going with a new strategy where for every new card I get I have to get rid of 15 that I already possess. Whether it's via trade or more stuff headed for the trash. Don't care, just get it out of my house.

5. A limit of 15 TTM requests per month

Coinciding with me going very cheap with my spending is how I think the days of me just chucking TTM requests out willy nilly are kind of over. Five years ago I would get every pre-rookie card of a not quite notable name in a stack and send them out as TTM returns during the course of a season. I could be wrong of course but even I have to admit that I'm feeling like I'm getting diminished returns every year.

Since the totals are going down anyway, the plan in 2020 is to be more selective. Focus more on people who I'd want an autograph of because I'd really want their autograph. Not "just because". Who knows I might even track who I send requests out to this year?

A limit of 15 requests per month would entail 30 stamps total per month. Assuming that the prices on forever stamps stay at $0.55, that's $198 (30*0.55*12) for the entire year. That seems like a large number, but it's a lot less than what I spent in 2019 on stamps and the idea is that I don't even reach that cap. The hope is that I stay far far below it.

4. $60 cap on sealed boxes/packs for the entire year

A variation of my yearly two blaster limit rule. This idea is to keep myself from buying more than $60 worth of loose retail (or hobby?) boxes/packs for the entirety of 2020. I get the itch/urge to rip packs just as much as anyone and I need tighter measures in place to hunker down and control myself. Also this criteria includes stickers.

3. $150 cap on IP autograph related costs

So thanks to events like my semi-local card show, team-organized meet and greets, spontaneous Modell's meet and greets, and book signings, I realized the need to pay more attention to how much I'm spending on opportunities for IP autographs. I'm giving myself a $150 cap for costs related to how I usually get IP autographs at these sanctioned events. Outside of the time I met Mariano Rivera, I've never actually spent that much, but I do know that this is a game where the signings are sudden and can be very pricey, especially for people I like and would want autographs of. So I want to give myself some leeway. Anyway those costs explicitly include: autograph fee's, entry fee's to events/shows where the purpose is to get an IP auto, and any money spent on goods to get signed (like if I need to buy a ball at Modell's to get an autograph).

2. Three cards per month on eBay/Amazon/COMC/insert-online-retailer-here combined*

What ultimately doomed me whenever I "caught the bug" was that I went pretty hard with various purchases I made on eBay especially. So I'm going to try to limit myself to three cards per month from all of these online stores combined. That might not seem like a lot, but when I catch the bug even five cards can add up to a decent chunk of change. The fact that my address is probably going to change at some point in 2020 isn't going to make deliveries any easier so that's more incentive to cut down on purchases for a while.

As for the asterisk?
*This excludes Luis Torrens cards that would be new to my collection
My Torrens collection takes top priority in most facets of my life. If a Torrens card I need for my collection that's not already in my Torrenterion collection ends up being the fourth purchase I make online that month, it doesn't count towards this limit. But if it's a dupe it counts.

1. $600 cap on hobby related purchases for the year with a $20 exemption for one SIY team set and one NYPL top prospect set in August

I'm hoping that the measures I took in goals 2-5 will make this budget a whole lot more tenable.

In years past I gave myself a $50 limit per month adding up to a total of $600, but I've come to realize that that's not really working for a myriad of reasons. So instead is this variation of it where I'm thinking of going into the year with a lump sum budget of $620 for the whole year with $20 of it designated for a predetermined purpose, and the remaining $600 is for whatever I feel like as the year goes on. Ideally the $198> in TTM stamps, $60> in sealed boxes/packs/stickers and $150> in IP auto fees ($408> total) is meant to come out of this, leaving me with about $192 (possibly more if I decide not to bother with TTMs or paid IPs or wax that much) to play with for whatever hobby expense I decide to spend on. Although I'm sure a big portion of that will just end up going to shipping fees.

The bit about the $20 for a Staten Island Yankees team set and a New York-Penn League top prospects set in August is just so I have a little more wiggle room for IP stuff around that time.

To be clear, shipping fees to have cards I bought sent to me will be included in what constitutes as a hobby related purchase.

And to be even clearer with myself, I will track how much I spend on shipping costs related to the Zaps I send out to other collectors, but I won't count it against the budget as I'm more curious about how much I'm going to spend on Zaps now that most of the "just get it out of my house" stuff is gone. I'm hoping I can keep it under $100 now that all of the large volumes of stuff I needed to send through priority boxes are gone and all I'm going to be left with are a few piles of cards I gradually stop holding on to.

Unrelated Scan 2

So there we go, a new set of goals with one common purpose. So I stop spending money that I might need for an emergency because all of the money I spent in 2019 on this hobby equals one ambulance ride in the US (maybe even less). Wish me luck.

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