Could you ever imagined that your childhood hobby could make you thousands of grands? Just by childhood enthusiasm of collecting autographs of popular personalities could have been paying pension for your lifetime. Ha! Interesting discussion, hell ya!

This is one of the biggest return on investment without much investment you would ever see. Collecting autographs since childhood, or even trading them in your young age, and buying them when you grow up and later selling them for few grands is not a bad decision. Those autographs you collected as a hobby, can now become a money making machine. At least that’s what you would see at Nate D Sander’s website. My brain thinks about only money, that’s why I could only get impressed by the figures against each autograph or even a small autographed 8×10 frame. But no way, I would mean to forget the efforts behind building this up to a level.

Nate has started this in 1986 as an individual’s company and initially dealt with Hollywood autographs and signed photos. Now the same company is into multi-million dollar business by buying and selling autographs, collectible items, fine art. It’s making me believe that every other little special thing around me might make me few grands after 30-40 years when I would be beyond an age of being able to work. Could you imagine that civil war letters could bring you $800-850, when they were not of really that monitory value (of course by no means you can value them, they are invaluable that way) when they were bring written.

Nate Sanders has really done a good job in auctioning these items that they seem to have become respected and well known source of collectibles. You just name it, and they have collectible items for sports, photography, books, art, politics, entertainment – all.

Alright, so now your time to get impressed is over. Let your brains start working – and figure out if you have collected any signed photographs, autographs or Sports Memorabilia. I am not sure if all avenues we know to do the independent selling, would really work for us. Instead, I would suggest to approach such companies like Nate Sanders’ and sell our belongings to them for small commission and let them handle the rest.

I am sure some of you would definitely make most of this opportunity and make few bucks. Let other’s also know your casestudy or simply email me through contact page about how your hobby turned out to be in cash cow.

It’s festival time guys, I am already seeing lights and decoration in my offices, how about you? Everyday, I see colleagues around lighting up their desks, shopping for gifts for their friends and relatives. Many of them are behind the famous Wii Fit, some of them are still into digital cameras. But most of the focus is on electronic goods. Even I was mad like this for online shopping in 2005-06, that I almost spent $2-3K on shopping in thanksgiving time. Even my friends spent same money but they probably got less stuff in the same amount. How come?? It’s an interesting secret that should not be a secret anymore, but due to loads of new people coming online for shopping, it will be always a hidden secret for them.

I used to shop at Overstock, Best Buy, Buy.com, Circuit City, New Egg very often and I saved like 20% of my expenses by using Overstock.com promotion code and 10% on Best Buy coupon code. Now why not I would get more stuff in the same price? Any reason. But most of the people don’t know it and they miss the chance of saving some money on online shopping.

See you would be wondering how companies can offer such a discount only on entering some text. The companies already save lot of cost by selling online; like the cost of display, physical shop, employees’ salaries in shops etc. They just try to pass on the discounts to customers. They could offer direct discounts as well, and they do at times but by giving coupons they can track the sale by coupon code which is associated with the relevant festival or time of the year most of the times. Even sometimes if not cash discount, these offers can save you cost on shipping etc that are equally expensive while shopping online. I had used a Newegg.com promotion code that was valid for free shipping and had almost saved $100-200 on many of my items together.

Talked about the benefits, but where you can get some for now. I linked to a website that I recently found (I have linked to couple of such sites before too, to be specific last year). I will keep on finding such websites and bring them to you so you can also save some money on your online shopping this Christmas! Don’t go by the design of the website, it’s not that web 2.0 design, just a simple html one. But you get what you want inside, so then who cares! Still not a bad idea to look at the web design seriously.

Obama’s historical win is all over the press today. I could not left out without reading it. That sent me all over back in my past days when I was the New Yorker. All over the social networking sites, my friends flood me with election messages and post result. Their reactions are certainly telling me how happy all of them are to see ‘the change’.

Most of my friends are from New York city and used to ask me to become New Yorker then, but I never gave it a serious thought. This word always remind me of a very popular magazine and it’s store “The New Yorker Store” – Obama did not tell me about it though. Basically, it’s as common for New Yorkers to go to this online store as going to Wal*Mart, specially when someone is looking for  the New Yorker merchandise like embossed 80 GB portable hard drive or t-shirts.

This is not an amateur website or portal by the way, it’s well established, well known store website for lot of shopping. Specially their open edition prints of The New Yorker cartoon are famous in the collectors – like I had mentioned in the earlier post about it.

The major class of people who visit this store are art lovers who are more interested in the New Yorker art and cartoon paintings by cartoonists as Roz Chast, George Booth, Robert Weber, Leo Cullum etc. They have an online gallery that you can check to buy the art online. These are some of the magnificent pieces of art work for any existing art collector or wanna be collector. Well, and it makes the perfect gift for relevant occassions and taste of people. Who won’t like to have an art from one of the influencial magazines of all time in the States?

I am kind of fan of this store, and keep on visiting it often to check what’s new like I do with other websites I write about. I will bring some more interesting websites by end of this year. Stay tuned!