No one can tell you what the right thing to do is; its subjective and very personal. You could take advice from 100 people here, but only YOU will be impacted by either selling your records or keeping them. But it may help to consider the following (mostly philosophical) issues:
If you sell, later when the money is gone, then what; how will you feel?
Like many of us, your records will have been the soundtrack of your life; so if you sell, does a significant part of you go with it?
Are you selling to cash in, coz some records fetch good money now, or are you selling coz you’ve had enough of (some) them?
As above, if most of your records were worth pocket change, would you still be considering selling them?
If the premise for selling is that yre getting old and cant take them with you; doesnt that also apply to every other asset you own? You cant take with you the money you get for the records either, if your demise occurs before you spend it all!
For many of us of a certain generation, the records we bought, and own were cheap, and now ‘owe us nothing’. So the percentage gain in selling them now is enormous. But we never bought them as investments; we bought coz we were/are emotionally invested in them. Are you still; or have they (or some of them) lost some of that for you?
Back in the day, the only way to hear records we loved, in our own homes, was to buy them (originals or boots), or tape them ‘live’ at a venue. Now this is no longer the case; we can now own nothing, yet have pretty much 99% of mainstream and obscure records on mp3 via YouTube etc, streamed right into our homes. So if you sell, you can still listen to everything you currently own (and more). So the question is really about to what extent the ownership of the physical product/entity means to you.
If these records/collection have been a part of you for most/all of your adult life (maybe before that), and been the soundtrack of it; if you sell them will you still be the person you were/the person you’ve been???
Is there a way for you to assess the value of what you sell, and the pleasure that money (or what you do with it) will give you, against the pleasure of continuing to keep them? Whatever the answer to that is, may well be the right way to go.
Finally; take note of all those before us who’ve sold up, and how many of them express regret; coz they wish they hadnt, coz records have shot up ridiculously in price since, coz they miss them, etc etc. How will it feel to be one of the many constantly saying..”I used to have that”😜
