Calculating The Cost Of Certification?

The reason your posts are always formatted to look like poetry continues to elude me, but reading them that way is enjoyable.

"The reason your posts are always formatted to look like poetry"
This is a first for me, I'm not sure how to take it,
Grain of salt and some appreciation? Thank you
Never had anything I've ever written been described as anything that would use the word "poetry"
Lots of other descriptions, nothing remotely close to a positive remark

This is where this started:




Where is it ending?

With the answer to the question?

For me the "end" is when I have no questions,
It's a life long thing….

Well to be honest, I'm happy you take it as a positive, though I wasn't assigned value to it one way or the other. I've just come to notice that you tend to type an idea or thought on each line, as opposed to actually stringing sentences together and composing paragraphs as I'm doing right now, for example. This can make understanding your meaning or intent difficult, since you don't follow modern conventions of grammar and composition. Makes for interesting reading, if sometimes obscure.

I think differently.
Pretty bad at written, I know!
Theres lots I can't explain, I've tried.
I know my strengths and own my weaknesses
Apparently I hold a decent conversation,
but that's somebody else's opinion

My view about certification it that you are paying for someone else's opinion, an expert opinion, but only an opinion.

I'd rather spend $100 on research material to get closer to having my own expertise than losing the money to someone else who's expertise can be uncertain. I have certificates that are completely incorrect but I only know that because of the research I have done.

For me it like the old quote, "Give a man a fish and he eats for one day, teach a man to fish and he can eat for a lifetime".

certs are useful.
cost: 30-60 dollars depending on value and location
shipping - Sometimes you have to pay shipping back and forth in addition to the expertise fee.
total cost can be 50-60 bucks - The 30-35 dollar cert does happen under the right circumstances - US purchase, auction house eats some fees or maybe bulk purchase etc...
Many times even high-end auctions houses miss stuff. There were some articles about collectors who have certitis. Those collections are usually high quality.
Collections without certs, Beware! You really have to trust the collector. And APS memembers and ASDA sell forgeries as real and misidentified stamps too. And they are usually the higher end of collectors. I have even seen specialized dealers miss stuff.
Thus, there is value in getting the opinion of an expert.

I would agree with this but only to a certain point. There are some aspects of a stamp that should (or must) be evaluated by an expert. For me, color varieties sit at the top of the list followed closely by early coil perforations as they are frequently faked.

I'm not an expert nor do I claim to be. Even if I spent time and money on my own research, I couldn't hope that my hypothesis (educated guess) could come close to someone who has spent years (decades) looking at known copies of what I'm guessing at. Yes, certs can occasionally be incorrect, but the auction houses and collecting community-at-large widely accept them as fact.

That's reason enough for me to seek certification by an expert.