You probably had one of these fine friends from one brand or another when you were a kid, something to hold during the dark nights and keep the monsters under the bed at bay. If you stayed as loyal to this toy as it did to you – and it’s a specific brand – it may have one last monetary gift for you.
Steiff bears are known as the original teddy, and plenty of them have reached a vintage status, and that means cash. An adorable, fluffy Louis Vuitton-clad Steiff Bear, for instance, sold for a record $182,550 at a charity auction.
Vintage bands tees
If there's a market for old beer cans and cereal boxes, you can bet vintage band shirts command a high price. They serve as bookmarks in the annals of music history, such as The Beatles' 1966 “Butcher” album cover, which was immediately withdrawn, which made it to a t-shirt in the 1970s, eventually selling on eBay for $595.
An original 1987 Guns N' Roses t-shirt from their Appetite for Destruction European tour sold for over a thousand dollars, and the most valuable item is a Nirvana In Utero tour shirt given to the crew who helped, which went for almost seven thousand big ones.
Vintage Microphones
We doubt you have one of these hanging around in your home since most of the singing we do is in the car or the shower. But if you happen to have a real piece of retro microphone, you could be sitting on a sudden cash flow. Exceptionally rare pieces such as the Neumann U-47 from the 1940s can, in fact, be worth tens of thousands of dollars, and one on eBay recently sold for $9,999.
Of course, a microphone in poor condition – or the wrong model – is probably not even worth a hundred dollars, but there's always a chance.
Action Comics No. 1
You were expecting this one, weren't you? It's one of the most famous, rare, and valuable items ever, and it's the reason you've probably got a box full of old Moon Knight issues in the crawl space. Building contractor David Gonzalez learned about its worth firsthand when he found this iconic comic book, purely by accident. While renovating a house in Elbow Lake, Minnesota, David found this comic book insulating a wall, along with a bundle of newspapers.
It was graded a 1.5 out of 10 due to a detached front cover but still sold for an incredible $175,000. If you happen to have a near-mint copy, like the 9 out of 10 issues sold in 2011, you could rake in a heart-stopping $2.16 million.
Fender & Gibson Guitars
If you had a dream of making it big in the rock and roll biz when you were a kid and begged your parents for the coolest guitar in the shop, you still might have something to show for it, even if you don't have fans screaming your name. Vintage guitars made by Fender and Gibson, the two biggest ax brands, are worth quite a bit. The more vintage the guitar, the more it's worth it.
A nostalgic item is a good item – a Gibson Les Paul made in the '50s can bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars. Famous guitars are worth even more, like John Lennon's Gibson J-160 Acoustic-Electric guitar sold in 2014 for the biggest number on this entire list: $2,266,970.