Its hard to narrow down the list. I've been trying to scale back my gun and knife collection, and have to convince myself to part with some of the items I've been sending to new homes.

In the end, I simply cannot afford to keep everything.

There are some items I should keep, but simply can't afford to do so if I want something else. The cost of INFI puts pressure on every other aspect of my hobby. Heck, I spent $1400 this month on three knives. That's A LOT of money for a one-income household.

Take my Scrapper 5 issue. I love the design, but have one CG and two LE's. In the end, its a smarter move to keep the INFI and sell the SR101. I wish I could keep all three, but I can't justify having three of the same knives in my collection and one of the INFI's is a user while the other is a safe queen. The CG is "new" so I don't want to use it.

I went through the same thing with my FIVE SOD's. In the end, I had to keep a safe queen and let the rest go (or I wouldn't have been able to add a safe queen NMSFNO to my collection).

Recently I bought another SJTAC so I'm parting ways with one of my last two DF's to pay for it.

I use to hate the lack of releases, but now I'm hating the number of them. Its hard to keep up while trying to "fill in" the older stuff (at secondary market prices).

At one point I sat down and added up the "secondary market value" of my collection, and was astounded to see what it was "worth". Since all of my knives were either bought new and sold at roughly the release price or bought secondary at secondary prices and sold at the same price (or often less than I paid) I figured I'm at a net loss. It is hard to build a collection that way!

I waffle between being a "user only" and "user collector". The former would be far more cost effective, but the latter offers the pride of owning these beautiful pristine blades. I'll probably always be a "user collector" but want to shift the balance toward user.