I like your idea of thinking outside the box, but older games are not always uniform and have liquidity issues. When I mean uniform, you will get varying condition of the game, may or may not have box or instructions, and it's hard to compare against other sales as they may not occur as often. It may be hard to resell a game at a given price point because of the limited demand for such games.
As for buying precious metals, I am personally not a fan because you are basically betting against the strength of the dollar (assuming US).
I don't claim to be an armchair economist but there is no guarantee on metals being more valuable in the future. Did some quick research into historical gold prices before the recent hysteria.
Roughly speaking, gold was the following prices:
Jan, 1995: $380/oz
Jan, 2000: $285/oz
Jan, 2005: $425/oz
Jan, 2010:
$1120/oz
Holding from 1995 to 2000 you would have lost money!
From 1995 -> 2005, you roughly would have made 1%/yr return on your investment. Meanwhile during that time period, a traditional CD would have earned you 5-7%/yr between 1995 -> 2000 and 2-4% between 2000 -> 2005.
All I'm suggesting is be careful. If you look at historical gold prices, it appears to be a long term bubble. I saw this coming when everybody and their mom had a TV commercial asking to buy your gold. At prices of today, there is a lot of downside risk, or at least a large market correction. Everybody should know markets are not perfect and often overshoot in both directions. Just like Spring 09 when there was a massive selloff and the Dow hit 6600.
If you do buy gold, buy it in stock form. GLD is a good ticker symbol. Holding it and being able to trade it yourself can be very hard, storage and security is an issue and finding a broker to buy it as well.
My view on gold is basically this; it will drop when the economy picks up. If the economy doesn't ever pick up, you will want something functionally useful i.e. guns and ammo. Gold in and of itself is not useful to an individual other than a nice paperweight or a weapon to smash someone with.
Please feel free to disagree with me on this topic. I just wouldn't want to have someone be misinformed and *possibly* lose a lot of money. Hope this helps.
