Thomas H. Ruggie is founder and CEO of Destiny Family Office, a multifamily office that serves 18 families, including his own. The business also serves other wealth management clients. He is also the host of the recently launched Significance of Wealth podcast, which covers collectibles, family offices and investment alternatives. His interest in collecting sports memorabilia has led to a subspeciality: advising families on handling collectibles.
How did you realize collectors need advice on how to handle their collections?
I’ve got a fairly significant sports memorabilia collection, and as I was redoing my legal documents, I realized that that I’ve got a significant asset that nobody in my family knows or cares anything about. I’ve got a succession plan problem: If I don’t make it home today, there’s nobody that understands or knows anything about this collection. So I went on a personal mission to learn what I should be doing. Then I said to myself, if I have this problem – and someone in my profession probably ought to be more on top of it than I was – there are probably other wealthy collectors out there, not just of sports memorabilia, but of cars, artwork, or whatever, that have a similar problem.
This is the intersection of my two passions: what I do for a living, and my memorabilia collection.
How did you get started collecting sports memorabilia?
I started as a kid. I was born and raised in Florida, and spring training for baseball is down here. My dad took me to my first game when I was 7. At that point, they literally let you crawl on top of the dugout and hang over and talk to the players. So at 7 years old, I started buying baseball cards of these players and hanging over the dugout and trying to get them signed.
Today, my collection has three components: I have sports autographs. I have game-used, one-of-a-kind memorabilia, like the fighting trunks that Muhammad Ali wore when he fought George Foreman, in the Rumble in the Jungle. And I have about 50 original art pieces that are all sports related. This includes about 35 original artworks by Dick Perez, who is the official artist for the Baseball Hall of Fame.
What issues do people with valuable collections need to consider?
I have developed a scorecard that consists of different areas that you ought to be looking at if you have a large collection, including how are you protecting it, and how are you tracking the value? Unlike the stock market, for example, the value of my signed Babe Ruth card doesn’t get tracked on a daily basis.
The Ali shorts I mentioned are a good example. They are from arguably his most famous fight, and it’s hard to place the value on that. You could value them at what I paid at auction seven or eight years ago. But the sports memorabilia space has appreciated significantly since then. I could go to an auction house and they could put a value on it. But that’s the only way you can really update the valuation on something like that.
Another issue is how to document the authenticity of a unique item. I have documentation on where the Ali shorts originally came from, and I have authentication from two different outside parties that have evaluated them and said, yes, these are the actual shorts, and the provenance of where they came from is good. I have a photo match of the shorts from the fight. So that’s the sort of thing we look at from an authenticity or provenance standpoint.
How do you handle succession planning for a collection?
What are your goals with the collection? Do you want to divest yourself of your collection, assuming you live long enough? Or do you want your heirs to divest of it at your death? Planning needs to be done for these decisions.
Using myself as an example: I don’t know that my daughter is interested in my sports memorabilia, though she might want something just for sentimental reasons. My son also has no interest in my sports stuff, and he has made it very clear that he doesn’t need anything for sentimental reasons. I do have some signed rock and roll memorabilia that he has an interest in.
What I’ve done I’ve documented everything: the authenticity, what the value is, and, most importantly, where to go with those assets to divest of them. In most cases, it’s various auction houses.
For example, I have the 1952 baseball card set, and of the 407 cards I have, 399 are signed. I made a specific directive of which auction house I would recommend for that set to go to. But I would let the auction company determine, for example, if they want to break it up and sell the Mickey Mantle card separately or sell everything as one.
Should collecting be viewed as an investment or a passion?
I think some people collect strictly for investment, but I think most people are probably more like me in that it starts with passion, but it’s still viewed as an investment.
I’m in the investment business, so this is something I stay on top of pretty well. I used to say that for every dollar I had to invest, I wanted to “invest” $.20 of that dollar into my sports collection. I used that as a rationale to do what I wanted to do, whether it was logical or not. Fortunately, it’s been a good place to have investment dollars. But the candid answer is, I was more just trying to rationalize to myself and to my family that I was spending the money.
At this point, because my collection is so specific, I don’t have a set budget, but I have set items that I’m looking for. I talked about that 1952 set of baseball cards, and I’m missing eight cards from that year. One of those eight cards is actually at auction right now, and I intend on winning it.
Most collectibles have appreciated significantly over the past 10 years. This is an extreme example, but I have the 1952 rookie Mickey Mantle card signed that 10 years ago I paid $11,000 for and today would probably auction off at $250,000 to $400,000.
What are some common — and unusual — types of collections?
I have a database of auction houses for various types of collections. Art and cars are probably the two most common. Currency is very common, and there’s a big demand for sports memorabilia.
There are other neat things out there, too: pop culture stuff, for example. I’ve seen catalogs of Nintendo games and VHS tapes that are now getting graded and coming up for auction. Even the first iPhone and the first Apple computer. Even though I collect sports cards, it’s amazing to me the following that things like Pokémon cards have, and how much some of that stuff is worth. I would never pay the money that some of these people are paying for that. But obviously other people would say that about my collection, too.
