Why do people sell their gear?

I love a great deal on used equipment as much as the next guy. And I'm constantly scanning the "for sale" board for stuff I don't particularly need. There's never a shortage of people selling their gear. I can think of a few scenarios where you would be selling stuff: bought new gear and off loading the old stuff, tried new gear and didn't like it or permanently hurt and can't climb anymore. The last is just a damn tragedy, but I see a lot of "selling whole rack" and things of the like. There can't be that many people getting out of climbing all together. So why do so many people have so much extra gear they're selling? I personally horde every single piece of gear I own. I never know when I might need something. Just looking to feed my curiosity.

You can't buy food or pay bills with climbing gear.

There are plenty of people whose lives change, and they can no longer climb as much as they used to. In which case, sell the gear perhaps!

I think there are a lot of people (I know one in particular) who make good money, get into climbing and just buy a shit load of gear before they know if they like it. I know a guy who has been top roping for like 6 months, he's climbed outside a handful of times. Never even led sport. Yet he has a full rack of cams, 4 ropes, 6 ice screws, full mountaineering setup, ascenders etc. he will maybe actually lead one day and hate it, then one of us can benefit from his nearly flawless rack up for sale

I'm with you. I have loads of stuff, and some of it is definitely overkill (3 sets of ice tools), but I can't bring myself to sell any of it.

I'm betting that when you see loads of gear being sold it's one of two things.

1. Person has new job that limits time and/or moves to new place with no climbing.

2. Taken up new recreational hobbies and no longer really interested in climbing.

I used to be really into mountain biking and cyclocross racing and have a couple of really nice bikes that never get used because all I think about is climbing now. I like the idea of being able to get back to doing some cycling so I don't sell them, but I could see someone in a similar situation really getting into kayaking(for example) and selling all of their climbing gear because it has sat unused for the last 2 years and they just don't have the interest anymore.

hoarders vs. non hoarder. previous poster = hoarder mentality. I personally anthropomorphize the feelings of my own gear and it gets very sad when not used. Thus I sell old climbing shoes that get depressed when they sit in a box for too long as i can't stand to have them moping around the house bringing everyone down.

I just sold two bikes because they weren't getting used. My passions have rotated over the years, and while they sometimes overlap, other times one has to go in order to make room for the other. I was a very avid MTB and road racer when I started climbing. I did all of it for awhile, until the biking gave way to climbing as much as possible. Then I moved out west, and snowboarding took over in the winter, and I got back into biking heavily. I kept all of my gear through those changes, but eventually it started to be liquidated. Now I am married and have two little kids, so no time for a ton of expensive and time consuming hobbies. I've returned to climbing as much as possible now that we have friends who climb with kids. I feel like I'm a lifer now. I'd have replaced all of my gear by now anyway.

I think most of the time full sets of gear are sold by people who are getting out of the game, but I think a lot of it is also people who either make enough that they want a shiny new rack of lighter, better gear; or people who move somewhere else and need less of certain things (notice that you pretty much never see racks of used totems or BD ultralights for sale). I have 3x double racks for climbing splitters, if and when I move back east for medical school I'd almost certainly sell two of them.

Constantly honing my gear setups (rock, ice, ski, backpack, etc.). Buy a couple of pieces of used gear, try them out to decide what works best for me, and then resell the gear that doesn't.