Will the Cellphone be the future collectible? Or the Desktop?

What will be the future collectibles?

Coin collecting, stamp collecting and baseball card collecting have seen better days. In fact, the population of coin and stamp and baseball card collectors is literally dieing of old age. I frequently go to coin and stamp collector conferences and "shows" where coins and stamps are bought and sold and you don't see many young numismatists or young philatelists. Many are 60 years old or older. Baseball card collecting still has some years left because the last time baseball cards were "hot" was in the 1980s.

What makes a collectible? Well one of the big factors is the desire to relive our childhoods. So we have to ask what are today's 30 and 40 year olds remember and what would they like to relive again through collectibles?

You can make an argument for the toys and games of the 1980s such as Power Rangers and Mutant Ninja Turtles and Cabbage Patch Kids and original Trivial Pursuit games and the original Transformers toys that turned from cars to robots. Betamax machines and Beta movies could be the future collectibles.

And what about collectibles for those who grew up in the 1990s? Well for them it could be desktop computer and laptop computers and personal electronics such as tape players and CD players.

And for the kids who grew up in the first ten years of the 21st Century? Cell phones. Cell phones because affordable and disposable in the early 2000s and anything that was thrown out years ago becomes a rare collectible 20 years later.

Mickey Mantle's rookie baseball card is so valuable today because so many kids in the 1950s threw them out... or else their Moms threw them out when they went off to college. My Mom threw out my second retirement fund when she threw out my shoebox of Yankees cards from the 1960s that were in a shoebox. That shoebox went into the trash in 1970 when I went off to college. I have over the last three years considered a mining project for the landfill near my home.

As cell phones get cheaper (you can't get cheaper than free) and as more of them head for recycling or just the trash, the survivors are more likely going to be the future collectible stars.

A couple of weeks ago, I took the three old cellphones that were in my sock drawer to a recycling company. I "donated" them because they had no recycling value. But now I think that twenty years from now they might be auction material for collectors.

And that brick phone that you couldn't afford when Motorola unveiled it 40 years ago and sold for several thousand dollars each? One in "mint condition" -- meaning it wasn't used as a doorstop or a paper weight -- might be the king of cell phone collectibles and it might be on the cover of the auction house catalogue twenty years from now.