I found it!!!! 1990 No S mint mark Lincoln cent? How can you tell?

Most of the new collectors who post to various sites and message boards have tunnel vision looking for errors. Most of the error they are looking for are things most of us never considered errors or at least distractions worth a premium, like die breaks, cracks, filled letters or numbers, L from LIBERTY on the rim of Lincoln cents, etc.

These new collectors are told by posters on YouTube, Etsy, eBay and similar sites these could be worth hundreds of dollars or more. 99% of these new collectors know nothing about the series but are busy searching for errors. Most of us learned about errors after we knew the series. It makes more sense to know the characteristics of a coin in a series first so you’ll be in a better position to recognize any errors.

 

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Absolutely true, I follow a couple of the facebook coin collecting groups and they are just unbelievable. One of my favorite common questions is, "I'm new to collecting, what should I look for?" How do you even answer that?

 

New collectors lose the whole thrill of being washed over with history when they approach the hobby like this. The whole reward of collecting is being awash with the history of the previous generations that held and used these pieces. If you are looking for monetary reward play the stocks.

 

Absolutely! On the rare occasion someone on one of those groups comes up with a common date Indian cent or v nickel, and all the responses just say not worth much, I try to give a little history of what was going on at the time and encourage the poster to start a collection.

 

Looks like steel wool!