LEtsGO Posted December 13, 2014 Posted December 13, 2014 Hi I'm a lifelong Lego fan who has many great memories of playing with Lego during my childhood. My modest collection included the 6274 Caribbean Clipper which I have less fond memories of the mast keep falling off, and the pride of my collection the Lego Model Team Sea Jet (5521) - I was young and easily impressed! Unfortunately I let me whole collection go when I went to University for what now seems to have been a rather paltry sum. Like many others though I have to also credit Lego as a major influence in becoming an Engineer and love the opportunity to use it whenever I can! I recently started thinking about investing in Lego as a 'passion' investment and a bit of a hobby. I already invest elsewhere so I see it as a fun diversification which certainly wont be the mainstay of my portfolio, but hopefully provide a nice return on small sums. I don't plan on filling my house with multiple Lego sets, just a few carefully selected ones for hopefully a nice return down the line. After doing some initial research, I have a couple of initial questions which I cant really find answers to. Firstly, are there notable differences between North American and European (UK) sets? I imagine this will just be limited to the packaging and have read a few articles on variances in older sets. Is a North American set just as valuable in the UK or does the UK market prefer UK sourced sets? Secondly, I appreciate Lego never announce when a set will be retired, but do they ever confirm the date when production ceased, after the set has been retired? I notice the Lego site sometimes lists sets as retired but cant find any information about when they changed from simply being out of stock to being retired. All the best LG Quote
Migration Posted December 13, 2014 Posted December 13, 2014 Welcome. And to answer one of your questions, you can tell the date that sets were retired by checking brickset.com Quote
justapilgrim Posted December 13, 2014 Posted December 13, 2014 not to directly answer your question but, I don't think that people really care where a set comes from, they just care about cost, sealed, box condition, etc and somewhat related, the UK will end up with UK exclusives, it is usually silly little lots like polybags with weekly newspaper, or in magazines. Likewise, not all US sets end up in Europe Quote
speedsausage Posted December 14, 2014 Posted December 14, 2014 Welcome. And to answer one of your questions, you can tell the date that sets were retired by checking brickset.com not to directly answer your question but, I don't think that people really care where a set comes from, they just care about cost, sealed, box condition, etc and somewhat related, the UK will end up with UK exclusives, it is usually silly little lots like polybags with weekly newspaper, or in magazines. Likewise, not all US sets end up in Europe Agreed. Welcome to BP! Quote
the_shy_guy Posted December 14, 2014 Posted December 14, 2014 Welcome and hopefully a good choice for investing in lego. i started 4 weeks ago and the hard thing is to stop with the investing. ( But rare Space and a lack of money brought me back to rethink next investments ) I think was a good time to start due a lot of sets get retired or get rare bcs of christmas. My objective is to have a lot of diffrent sets and not that amount of it. So i like to split the risk. You will learn to use all your email accounts and create new of them to get all possible discounts and find out when online shops will release the online discounts. Sometimes short after 00:00 sometimes early in the morning, and if you 're late don't be sad most of the things will discounted at another shop weeks later. It only takes more time like most here said to get your return of invest (ROI). Most of the sets i ordered online, it is very easy and you can send scratched packings back. My shops so far where kaufhof, mytoys, lego shop, intertoys, metro, Wish you all the best, so far i'm just a buyer. Quote
LEtsGO Posted December 15, 2014 Author Posted December 15, 2014 Thanks for all the welcome messages and advice. I took a look at Brickset.com and assume you are referring to the the box on the right, when you look up a particular set, entitled 'Availability at Lego.com'? Taking the Sandcrawler 75059 as an example, Brickset shows the UK availability dates as 29 Apr 14 to 17 Oct 14. Yet as of today the UK Lego website shows it as in stock. Therefore, do the brickset dates get updated with stock levels rather than production dates? Or is this genuinely a shortlived UK line? On the second point, about different countries of set origin, is it worth picking up a set or two when in USA given the savings from the exchange rate?! (Assuming you can get it back home in your suitcase undamaged!) Thanks LG Quote
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