| Future of Collecting-My Newbie Logic
I am new to coin collecting so please forgive my ignorance on the subject, but since I just made my first purchase yesterday on an 1871 Indian Head Cent with a little corrosion on it, I wanted to see if my logic made sense to you guys. First of all, I am not starting a collection for the monetary value, but intrinsically a “collection” should be worth something, but I am not collecting coins instead of having a 401k plan. Secondly, I came into collecting as a small collection was left to my wife and I through a great grandparent passing away. Therefore, I have those coins as a start of the collection and I would like to add to it, hopefully, we would pass it on to the kids or sell the stuff for a nice retirement vacation, because we all know we cannot take it with us. Finally, I came into coin collecting as an accident, but I have collected Baseball cards for the majority of my life, so I have some collecting knowledge before the coins came along. That was the intro, so here is my thought.
Let me preface this with this, I realize that there will be new and old coins that I will want to have as I learn more about collecting, I just want to see if my logic makes sense and get opinions. I have been trying to figure out what to collect should I stick to modern coins and commemoratives or should I try to upgrade the pennies that my relative obviously took pride in. Obviously, he is not around so I have to make an educated decision on this. I feel like modern coins might be a waste of time and here is my logic in this. Let me say by modern I mean from the 1970’s to now and I will refer to older coins as coins from the 1800’s. I feel like we are always looking for value in the coins that we collect either for personal reasons or for monitary reasons. I think that we have a unique opportunity to collect“rare” 1800’s coins for a relatively cheap value compared to what the future will have to pay for. As the American population increases, we will inherently have more people interested in collecting in sports cards, coins, or cars, who knows. Although currently we might have a bit of a population recession due to the economy, the prices of these coins should be amazingly high when the population of America hits 400 million in the year 2050. It will become much harder to obtain a 1909 S-VDB to complete collections.
So predict the future here: The projections say that we will have almost 400 million people in America in another 40 years. Currently population is somewhere around 306 million. The 1909 S-VDB has minted numbers of around 480,000. At those numbers that would be roughly 1 1909 S-VDB for every 1000 persons in America. To put that in perspective of my town that I live in, out of 80,000 people, only 80 people could have complete wheat penny sets. I am using these numbers to illustrate my point. I am sure I have holes in my argument, but I would just like the discussion.
As I was thinking about all of this, it would appear that the numbers would indicate to invest money into old coins. I could have done more research, but this was just a thought.
Cheers,
Chris
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