Should I sell my collection of expensive knives?

[Justin1911]

Hello, I have a question about what a relatively new Mustachian should do with an expensive collection. I am always looking for ways to increase my NW and simplify my life, but I'm struggling with this one. I have a large collection of traditional pocket knives that are worth quite a bit of money. I have nearly 100 pocket knives in total and their individual resale value ranges from $10 to over $500 in many cases. Much of this collection was inherited from my father and grandfather and I freely admit to having an emotional attachment to the majority of the collection. I truly enjoy acquiring old traditional pocket knives and repairing or restoring them. I only carry/use a small number of the overall collection while the rest are only brought out on rare occasions for research, conversation pieces, maintenance, or to be gifted.

One part of me wants to sell off the vast majority of these knives and just keep the handful that I actually use. This would certainly be a lot of work, but I would end up with a few thousand extra dollars to throw into the stash. I just don't know what to do here. Have any of you had to decide to keep or sell an important collection? What did you do?   

[2Birds1Stone]

Slow liquidate them, starting with the less desirable ones.

It doesn't have to be all or nothing.

One thing to note, often times a collector will be very optimistic when valuing stuff like this.

[FLBiker]

Personally, I've gotten rid of everything I used to collect.  I sold a little, and gave away more.  Mostly baseball cards and comic books.  Even leaving aside the money issue, I find it more liberating to NOT have a collection anymore.

[prognastat]

I would probably say take some time and track which ones yo use relatively often and definitely first keep those. Then the next part is really only something you can decide yourself, but I would look at the rest and gauge your level of emotional attachment. If it was simply it belonged to my father/grandfather then maybe it is worthwhile to think of getting rid of. If however it is for example the first one they gave you or possibly the last or has some kind of important memory attached to it then hold on to those.

[AlanStache]

Nothing wrong with a modest collection, so long as you know the cost of keeping it monetarily, emotionally and literal space in your home.  Every thing in your space also takes up space in your brain.  for many things the price is worth it, for many it is not. 

Last year I thinned out my book collection, the dime store fiction novels were easy to thin out.  Some of the graphic novels were harder and I chose to keep much more of them.  I started by putting everything I thought I wanted to get rid of in a box, then let it sit for a few months then went through it again and pulled out books I actually wanted to keep.  then donated the boxes.

documentary on Netflix "the minimalists", these guys have almost no possessions but talk about if you do have a collection of something and it brings happiness to you then keep it - like just chill.

All that said if someone has 43 different 10000$ collections of crap they should probably do some real self evaluations.