I think there comes a time in your life when it's okay to give up on a dream. For me, I think that time is near.

When I was little, I always wanted to own my own business. I wanted a baseball card shop where I could sell cards and make a living. I don't think I ever imagined how it would all work out or even thought about it as "making a living". I didn't think about having multiple mortgages or the cost of leasing a good space that would get me customers. Or the cost of advertising. Or having to pay Comcast every month. Or having to pay insurance on my place. Or electricity. Or parking. In fact, come to think of it, I didn't think about much. I just wanted a card shop.

At that age, I'd been to card shops and I thought they were cool. There was one I would ride my bike for miles and eventually walk my bike up the 164th Street hill just to check out what they had to offer. Back then it was an adventure, a pilgrimage of sorts. Once you got there, you'd have all the latest players out in display cases. They were all carefully displayed in hard plastic cases. They had the latest rookie cards and those hard-to-find limited edition cards. It was fun to see the rare and mint condition stuff I could never afford. Thinking back on it now, I'm pretty sure I mostly just went to look. Every now and then I'd scrape together enough dough to buy a pack. I can remember opening those packs, hoping to get some rare rookie I could sell back to the shop owner for a profit, but I never had much luck. I usually just left with a handful of commons and a stick of gum. I'm sure those "rare" cards were no more than $5 to $10, but I never had that much money. I wasn't from Mill Creek. I lived on the other side of the gate...:) (inside joke).

After I left the newspaper business in 2005, I did start my own business. I'd actually been successfully eBaying since I graduated college in 1999. At first it was just buying a few shirts and flipping them for profit. Then, the process expanded. Those few shirts turned into stacks of shirts that I'd move out of a small office in my parent's Marysville rambler. By the time I moved back to Bellingham in 2004, I had a downtown apartment filled with stacks of clothes. I'm sure it was a major fire hazard, but nobody ever complained and I had a great time and made a lot of money doing it. I mean, "a lot" is a relative term. My rent was cheap, my expenses were minimal and I wasn't worried about living the good life. I remember going to the Hostess shop around the corner, loading up on three loafs of bread for $1 and sitting there in my apartment that summer eating peanut butter & jelly sandwiches and drinking ice cold Coca Cola. I was living the good life of a successful eBayer and life didn't get much better than that.

To be continued...

Blog ideas ( if you have something you want me to write about, let me know and I'll add it)

Success vs. Failure

Selling the business

Addicted to eBay

Models

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