Anyone here a serious coin collector?

CH46E

Would like to chat with anyone seriously into coin collection especially error coins of late. I'm on growler 1 of 4. My eyes hurt. 😢

Tony M

I used to be until I was 31 when I sold my 5K collection for 3K+ cash to help a lot on a down payment on my house.

I lived for looking at ALL my change for double dies, pre-65 silver coins. I had a lot of Morgan Silver dollars in XF cond. or better but...my passion was Indian Head pennies. I also had a 50-count Egyptian Silver coin set that was pretty nice.

Newer oddities I thought were so rare now, it wasn't worth me looking for new ones. Plus my eyes are 67 now. Looking at coins hasn't been done without a jeweler's loop in maybe 15 years.

I still LOVE the wheel dance on new coins!

I still have a lot of penny varieties from the earlier years. Small and large dates. Filled dies and such. I still have my childhood Whitman coin books filled with a lot of what I could afford.

No silver Whitman coin books because my Mom sold the coins when silver reached 7.50 an ounce in the 1980's while she said she would take them and hold on to them to keep me from selling them while going through some tough times after moving away from them. I didn't speak to them for 3 years.

Then I did talk and visited till their passing.

I wanted to get a roll of unc. pennies for every year but the Indian Head Penny passion took over big time. I still have a ton of rolls. Even a 1933 Unc. roll. I knew the population of all the Indian Head penny dates. Yea...big passion for a low income budget but I bought good deals.


What do you want to know about concerning error coins?

Jimbo18

I started collecting in Whitman folders when Mercs (I called them lady dimes then) and Walkers were still in circulation. I had folders for everything from pennies to halves but only circulated stuff. When I got older, I slowly emptied them when I needed cash.

After I got out of the Air Force, I got interested in collecting again but I stuck to uncirculated Morgans and Walkers. They weren't too expensive in the mid-70's and the grading craze wasn't much of a thing. Like Tony, I sold off my collection for a down payment on my first house.

Years later, I started buying albums of uncirculated Jeffersons, Roosevelt dimes, and Franklin halves. This was after silver had dropped from it's crazy days around 1980 and you could buy a full set of Franklin halves in BU condition for a couple hundred. I broke up the sets and graded the individual coins and sold them individually and doubled to tripled my money.

So, I never checked circulated coins for errors but I did check all the ones I got out of the albums. I found die cracks, over mint marks, and cuds. The best thing coming out of the old albums was some beautiful rainbow toning. The acid in the paper either caused toning or spots but the ones without the spots were beautiful.

Anyway, my suggestion would be to stick to get rolls of coins from your bank and/or credit union. If you can get half dollars, there are some good rolls still out there since they don't circulate. Lots of errors in new coins but do they sell? Check ebay for completed sales on errors and determine which denomination sells the best. My guess would be quarters because of all the various reverse changes.

Condition is everything with coins so those you receive in change are probably not going to be very valuable unless they are VERY rare.

Tony M

I agree, some of those rainbow-toned silver coins are gorgeous!

My Mom would give me all the mercury head dimes she got in change. Yeah, they were still in circulation but getting scarce. Green stamps were her collecting goal.

She did let me look at all her change too. Wheatbacks were def. in circulation for quite a while.

One day, I found a fake 1945-no P nickel in it. Some dude made thousands of them and they look damn good too. It's listed in the Red Book too but no price, just a footnote describing them.

Many years later, I heard about a coin shop nearby. A very nice one at that. I saw a 1943 copper penny on display there. I think it was 10K.

I bought a lot of fine coins there.
Even an uncirculated 1837 FEUCHTWANGER 1CENT POPULAR HARD TIMES TOKEN. I loved Eagles on coins.



This shop had a huge auction bid board on one wall (12'x 4') with about 150 coins people would hang up each week. Some started at 0, others at mostly great deal prices hoping there would be a bidding war. It was great to look at all the coins each week. Some sold, some didn't. I think one would have to pay some small fee or pay a % of what they sold for. Great times.

I sold my collection there when I was going to move and buy this house. The one of 2 owners knew me well. I was a small-time $$ collector but I still had $$$$$ passion. I was always greated with a smile by that man.

Isn't it something, I can still see him smiling at me when he saw me walk in 45 years later.

The other partner was always looking at coins at a desk or he was the one who did the BIG $$$$$ deals there.

jdjohn

I 'inherited' some coins from my dad, which I think are mostly remnants from what he collected on his paper route back in the 1940s. There are Indian Head pennies, Wheat pennies, and a few Steel pennies, couple of Buffalo nickels, Mercury dimes (and a couple of Liberty dimes), Liberty quarters, half-dollars, and dollars, a few Kennedy half-dollars, and some other random pre-'65 silver coins. None of them are rare, or uncirculated. They're probably only worth their weight in silver, which is around $30/oz right now. There are also a few very sparsely-populated Whitman albums/folders.

I guess the most interesting item is a seated Liberty quarter from 1857 that was converted into a 'Love Coin Pin', with the initials Y.U.S. on it.