Tot up your returns with whisky, Lego and handbags
The stock markets are falling and savings accounts offer safe but tiny increases, so how can you get more bang for your buck outside of the conventional routes?
Well, like charity, money-making investment now begins at home with the things we all covet: start with the fun stuff such as Lego, handbags and even whisky!
handbags are my favourite. only re-selling specific arm candy earns extraordinary returns, from designers including hermes, chanel, Gucci and Dior.
In 2020, research from Knight Frank Luxury Investment Index showed that luxury handbags increased in value by an average of 13 pc per year compared to art, which only saw a 5 pc return.
The top performing bags are hermes ones, specifically their Birkin style, followed by the Kelly bag. and the values are staggering. In 2017 a hermes Birkin fetched more than £301,000 in a hong Kong auction.
The Birkin has seen a value increase of more than 500 pc in the last 35 years and luxury analysts such as Knight Frank say that its value could double in the next ten years. The holy Grail of Birkins is the black version with gold hardware. expect to pay at least £4,000 for even a basic Birkin at auction.
Slightly more affordable for new collectors, the hermes Kelly bag also reaps rewards in resale value if it’s in good condition, up by 129 pc in the last ten years. expect to pay a few thousand pounds for a good Kelly bag at auction or on a vintage website.
chanel is the next best label for investment bags. according to the luxury online retail platform Bag hunter, the price of a 2.55 chanel handbag has increased by 70 pc in just the last six years.
You can pick up designer bags at local auctions and, for the more expensive ones, at national auction houses such as christie’s, on vintage sites such as Vinted or even eBay.
Be careful as it’s easy to be conned into buying a fake, although eBay has expanded its authenticity Guarantee service to include handbags worth more than £ 500. Keep the bag carefully stored, and if you use it, get it professionally cleaned.
a somewhat cheaper, but fun, investment option is the popular Lego set. Those obsessive Legocollecting children we all knew have now grown up to be cashrich collectors, with websites dedicated to Lego as an investment. one such, Brickeconomy. com, includes analysis of how Lego sets have grown in value and forecasts future growth.
Similar to handbags, it’s all in the specifics. The Ultimate collector Millennium Falcon, for example, released in 2007, will shake the money tree. If unopened, its value will have grown by 528 pc to £2,150.78. The Statue of Liberty, released in 2000, has grown by 1483.73 pc to £2,489.79 per unopened set. on average, according to economists at hSe University in Moscow, secondary market prices of even the humbler retired Lego sets grow by 11 pc annually — faster than gold, stocks and bonds. Lego investors starting out should go for sets dedicated to famous buildings and films. Look for limited edition sets and keep them in their boxes as they fetch more if unopened. Finally, a drop of the hard stuff is a better investment than wine. With consumers of whisky now numbering more than 500 million worldwide, the market shows no signs of slowing: rare whisky was the best-performing collectable of the past decade, says the Wealth report from Knight Frank, with a rise in value of 582 pc on average across each of the ten years. at a Sotheby’s auction in December a four-decanter lot of 1950s Glenfiddich sold for £1,037,500, according to VcL Vintners. at the same event, a single bottle of The Balvenie 1964 sold for £175,000. Investing in the right whiskies requires research and even professional advice since the whisky should be rare and in high demand. Its age, where it’s from, if it was created in a single cask, its reviews and other factors should be taken into account.
The website Whiskystats.net shows which types of whisky have made the most money, while RareWhisky101.com has indexes of past performance. To buy and sell whisky, try Whiskybase.com, with its access to buyers and sellers around the world.