A couple weeks ago on our way to go camping, my lovely girlfriend and I checked out a Flea Market in Oro called The Electric Garage Sale. I love records, and after digging through crates of them, I stumbled across a fairly rare record by Glen Gould. While this record is not extremely valuable, it can still fetch around $50. This random find got me thinking about what kind of other exciting stuff people have found at garage sales. Turns out that are worth a lot…sometimes, millions a lot.

As always, if you like this article, please sign-up for our monthly newsletter. You can also find more out about The Friendly Financial Coach, Toronto’s only non-biased Financial Literacy Coach, here.

Vinyl Treasures

The first big find was by Warren Hill, a Montreal native, at a New York sidewalk sale in 2002. He stumbled across a rare demo pressing of the Velvet Underground’s first album, The Velvet Underground & Nico, and quickly bought it. He ended up paying just .75 cents and then subsequently sold it on EBay for $25,000. Since then, the album has been re-released and available to all…for about $30

Old Shares

This is my favourite, in 2008 Tony Marohn bought a box of documents for $5 from a garage sale in California. As he was digging through the box, he unearthed a stock certificate for 1,625 shares of Palmer Union Oil Company. Tony did some digging around and found out that this company underwent some mergers and at the end these shares were exchangeable for 1.8 million Coca-Cola Bottling shares. At todays market price, these shares are worth $289,764,000…a mind blowing amount. Unfortunately for Tony, he is now in court fighting to take possession of these shares.

A Box of Nintendo

In 2006, Rob Walters stumbled across a garage sale in Chelsea, New York that was selling some old Nintendo games. He ended up buying a box of games for $40. As he was leaving, the seller told him that he had more games, but they weren’t for sale. Later at home, Rob looked through his purchases and found games worth over $1500, including the rare Starfox Competition edition.

Later, Rob went back and convinced the seller to show him the rest of his video game collection. Rob was blown away…the seller’s attic was full of extremely rare games and some that were believed to be extinct. The rare games included, 1990 Nintendo World Championship, 1991 Campus Challenge, 1994 Powerfest and more. Rob was honest about the value, but the seller worked for Nintendo and was concerned with the legal implications of him selling the games. Rob offered him $1000 cash and the seller agreed. At the end, all of these games were valued at $50,000.

Don’t Be So Negative

In 2000, an ex-Yosemite worker bought some camera negatives from a garage sale because they reminded him of his work there as a youth. The negatives ended up sitting under a pool table for two years until he decided to take the negatives to an appraiser. He startlingly found out that Ansel Adams took them between 1919 and the early 1930s and were surprisingly valued at $200 million dollars.

An “Ugly” Painting

Teri Horton, a truck driver, paid $5 for a self-declared “ugly” painting from a garage sale as a joke for a friend. In fact, she thought that it was so ugly that she almost got rid of it. Eventually, a close friend goaded her to have it valued. After some investigation a fingerprint was found on it that matched Jackson Pollock’s. This ugly painting was recently put up for sale at the steep price tag of $50 million. Teri’s story has also been turned into a recent documentary titled, “Who the *$&% is Jackson Pollock”.

Hidden Behind a Painting

This is another really cool story. In 1989 at a Pennsylvenia Fleamarket a purcher bought a $4 oil painting. Hiding behind this painting was a copy of the American Declaration of Independence valued at $2.42 million.

Well that’s it for this week, thanks again for reading about the best garage sale finds. If you have an exciting garage sale finds yourself, please share in the comments section as I would love to hear about it. If you have any questions please contact me at info@ffcoach.ca or 647-289-0012. Also, please don’t forget to sign-up to our super awesome newsletter below!