There's Gold in dem dere Junkyards...

[BerniniCaCO3]

a friend is *obsessed* with ghostbusters.
She was looking at what it would take to find, buy, and then restore a 1959 mercury ambulance.
Answer? A LOT. Even doing the work yourself over weekends over years.

And fascinatingly, the ORIGINAL ghostbusters wagon, the one used in the first film, sold on ebay 2-3 years ago for $45,000.
Less money than you could easily spend fully restoring a rusty shell of a replica.

Therefore, I've decided that when I want to collect a car, I'll just buy one already restored.
Which is actually cheaper, an $8000 delorean shell that needs an engine (and much more), or a $25,000 restored delorean?
Or for that matter, people have posted here of pristine lincolns with 300 miles on the dash, that might be on sale for $15,000-$25,000.

Even these truly preserved, museum-grade examples have depreciated from new.
I'm just gonna buy what someone else held for me for 30 years.

...as for my beater cars, I want 'em in pleasing condition, no dead window motors, no torn seats, no ripped door handles.
I want to have some pride!
But beyond that there's a low limit to what I'll spend for NOS presentation-quality parts! My god, those are crazy prices!

[LTDMan83]

Personally, I enjoy building/restoring cars as a hobby, so I will always take the project car over the restored car. Even though I may end up spending more in the end, I will have the satisfaction of knowing that I built the car entirely myself, and I'll have much more pride in it, and respect for what it took to make the car what it is, than if I had just went out and bought an already restored car, which is something that anyone can do.

Really I just enjoy the hobby, and it's something that I'll always be doing. I'm not interested in having a huge car collection though, so at some point I'll be building 100 point cars just strictly to sell at auction for profit.

[tjc78]

Its common knowledge that many, many old cars are much cheaper to buy already done than to do it yourself. Thank God some people still have the ambition, skills, and money to restore them anyway. If not, more and more irreplaceable cars would be going to the crusher coming back as a dishwasher.

There are some exceptions and that mostly is in the land of late 60s muscle cars. The crazy money GTOs, Camaros, 442s, GS's go for makes restoration worth it. There are people who will 10K for a shell of car just for the VIN and the proper engine.