One Man’s Trash Is Another’s Treasure

Here’s another great story about Hidden Financial Treasures.

This week’s story is about a retired couple who have to downsize to prepare for a cross-country move. It leads to an unexpected windfall. This story appeared on the show Strange Inheritances.?

Hope you enjoy it!

Jim

P.S.?If you like the stories, please let me know what you think by leaving a comment!?

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And now for the story!!

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Don Camp and his wife Phyllis are a retired couple, now living in Colorado. In 2011, Dan retired from his job as an electrical engineer. He and Phyllis made retirement plans-travel, visit a daughter in Taiwan, etc.??

These plans also included moving to Colorado to be near grandchildren. This meant they had to downsize in the house they had lived in for over 20 years.?

Don had the unenviable task of spending time in their cluttered basement to determine which possessions they would take with them and which they would get rid of before the move West.?

He came upon two paintings that were lined up between storage boxes, covered with an old sheet. Dan’s mother had bequeathed the pictures to the Camps when she died in 1990. One portrayed a mountainous desert landscape. The other, in a “modern” style first popular 100 years ago, showed a woman in a red shawl, standing outside, next to the door of a building.?

What were they doing in the basement?

“The desert scene one was okay, I suppose,” said Phyllis.?“But I didn’t really like the one with the woman. She looked lonely.?

“And I am not a lonely person.”

So down in the basement they went.?

Phyllis’s first inclination was to donate the paintings to the Salvation Army. Don was fine with that. But he decided he would first find out what they were worth.?

So he loaded the paintings in the back of his van and drove to a local estate appraiser. On the ride, he kept his eye out for a dumpster in case the appraiser told him the paintings were worthless.?

“That’s Just a Landscape Painting-the Other Is Art”

The appraiser came out to look at the paintings in the back of the van. According to Don, he looked at the desert landscape painting first, with little to no reaction. But when he saw the painting of the lonely woman, his eyes widened the longer he looked at it.?

After making the comment above, they went to the appraiser’s office. He sat down at his computer and researched the paintings.

The names of the painters were on the paintings, and he entered them into a database.?

The painter of the landscape was not notable. The appraiser thought the landscape painting might be worth $700-800.?

But the painter of the woman was Victor Higgins. Higgins was a member of a famous artists’ colony in Taos, NM (the “Taos Society”), in the 1920s-30s. He died in 1949.

Higgins had a similar painting depicting four women, which had sold for over $400,000. Moreover, at some point in his career, he stopped painting pictures of people, only focusing on landscape portraits.?

Of course, now Don and the appraiser had to verify the authenticity of the painting. How had Don’s parents come into possession of the painting (named “Ruth,” since that name appears written on the back of the frame with the notation “$600”)?

Don didn’t know how his parents came to own Ruth. He spoke to his brother. His brother recalled that their Uncle Curtis had given the painting to Don’s parents.

They also learned that Uncle Curtis, a lawyer, had served on the board of the Chicago Art Institute.

Where Higgins had studied.?

Question answered.?

The Camps used their local estate appraiser to auction Ruth. They held the auction in upstate New York, to a full house with several people taking part by telephone (a few days before the auction, someone offered the appraiser $300,000 for the painting. He turned them down).?

They auctioned the desert landscape first. It fetched $1,100.?

Was this an omen for Ruth’s upcoming sale?

If so, it was a good one. A private art collector (one bidder on the telephone) bought Ruth for $650,000.

Did This Windfall Change the Camp’s Life Much???

Not really.?

They completed their move to Colorado. They donated about 25% of Ruth’s sales proceeds to Christian missionaries so a well could be dug for a poor rural village in Kenya.?

For themselves?

They got a new Honda Odyssey. That was about it.

Jim Anderson founded Electronic Commerce International in 2002. ECI is in Scottsdale, AZ. ECI is registered with Visa and MasterCard to provide credit card processing for businesses. Their specialty is data security and secure, reliable credit card processing.

For customers who pay with cash, ECI? will automatically apply a cash discount to the transaction. For card-paying customers, a small “service fee” is applied for the convenience of paying with a credit card. The vendor collects the?service fee, which offsets the credit card processing rate charged to the vendor. This is applied to the vendor’s account, eliminating most of the vendor’s processing fees.?

If you are interested, call Jim at 888-404-7500. You can email him at [email protected].