Jasmine Birtles

Barbie and Dr Who are perhaps not the first names that come to mind if you’re looking for things to collect for profit. Barbie and Dr Who are perhaps not the first names that come to mind if you’re looking for things to collect for profit. They’re hardly van Gogh, but they have been commanding headline-grabbing prices at auction for long enough now to be interesting to serious investors. The new collectibles say little about art — although they belong very much to the world of design. They are all about icons, dreams, personalities, popular culture and the fixations of youth. Toys, comics and gadgets from as recently as the 1980s and 1990s are changing hands for staggering amounts on eBay and speciality websites and, in some cases, in traditional auction houses.

It’s a law of the financial jungle that where there is debt there is desperation and where there is desperation you can sell all manner of dodgy ‘solutions’. Last year, commercial radio stations were full of ads telling us that — thanks to a ‘little-known loophole’ — half our debt could be wiped off if we would just ring the given number. You may even have been cold-called by computers about this fabulous ‘new’ idea. In fact they were just peddling Individual Voluntary Arrangements to the unwary. An IVA is a binding agreement with your creditors under which you pay off a portion of your debts, usually in monthly instalments over five years, in exchange for the writing off of the rest of the debt.