Can you purchase interesting coins with "minimum wage"?

Yes, really. Because, after 1 year of minimum wage work, 66% will earn more in their second year of employment. Plus, the majority of minimum wage earners are under 25. So, wait until those second, third, fourth, fifth years of being in the work force and having an actual career before you get married, have kids, and have hobbies that cost money.

While I understand for the older generations on Cointalk that it will sound nuts that people wouldn't be married and have kids by age 25, younger generations are delaying marriage and childbirth until later in life. That's a good thing. Older people make better parents, anyway, because their own lives are far more stable at that point.

If you're 21 and reading this thread thinking you'd like to start collecting coins (which is unlikely) but earning only the minimum wage, take up a free hobby like park walking or reading books on a subject you'd like to learn more about in the mean time.

 

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If you will move this to the "General Discussion" forum, I would be happy to respond to these comments. I respect @gxseries too much to hijack his thread.
In any event, thanks for providing me with my daily chuckle.

 

To keep this entirely on subject, I think the best strategy for collecting coins while earning minimum wage is to collect your home country's coins beginning with what you find in circulation.

1) It is easily accessible because you are handling the money in your everyday life anyway
2. It doesn't cost you anything. In fact, it forces you to save. So why not try to collect as many dates and variety of Australian coinage as you can?

 

Now that's more like it.........bravo.

 

If you are still in high school and living at home I don't see a problem. We keep trying to get kids involved with coins, and usually teenagers are the only ones with some disposable income they earned themselves. I bought a lot of nice coins in the mid-late '70s that way.

 

Me too........

 

Yes sir, you rang?
At your service...

 

And me too, sod I be.........

 

Or do it whenever you have money left over from your welfare cheque: I once heard on Radio Netherlands (before they went off the air) about a perfectly healthy and college-educated Dutch guy who has been on his country's public assistance program (welfare) since 1975(!) He rides a bicycle and writes articles for a neighborhood newspaper, so he's is perfectly capable of working, but doesn't. Oh, and he collects coins!

In my own life, I put off all of these things, pretty much as you mentioned, until I had the money to do so. I didn't plan it that way, really. I suppose I just didn't really know what hobby I wanted, and I didn't even know you could have a lasting "hobby" until coins came along. I tried photography for a couple years before that, but the prices just killed me...

 

There's nothing wrong collecting circulating coinage and it is a cheap way of doing it. In fact one can make cheap money from it. For instance the colored 2 dollar Australian coins are often hoarded from circulation and sold more than face value. Same with the Russian bi metal coins. I'm certain there are plenty of other world coins that are often traded for way more than face value.

I think @mlov43 can relate how common circulating Korean coinage be worth way more than face value. I do not know the average hourly wage in Korea back in 1960s are likely so I'll leave it to him.

Everyone starts off from somewhere. I acknowledge that if one is financially constrained, coin collecting is a luxury. Again, my intention is more catered towards young people who just wants to start coin collecting.

 

I could look up the average wage in the 60s, but there's no need: It's pretty safe to say it wasn't much. If someone had collected (and kept preserved in mint luster!) quantities of those early brass coins from 1966~1975, they'd absolutely be pretty happy campers. Two things that I noticed about these coins and their collectors, though:

1) It seems that cleaning was popular in Korea back then, and probably because of inadequate storage of those easily-tarnished brass coins in Korea's humid rainy season climate in the Summer. So, it's not likely that large numbers of these rather delicate brass coins survived in good condition by staying in Korea.
and,
2) Most of the best-condition and highest-grade South Korean coins were (I think still are) to be found in the United States (occasionally in Europe) for some reason. Now that coin collecting has gotten popular in Korea, many of those pieces are starting to migrate back to Korea, where they sell for between $50 and $1,500.

 

To answer the question in the OP's title, of course you can collect interesting coins on minimum wage. Since this is the world coins blog, we can bypass the pocket change and bank roll avenues (as fun as those are) and go right to the fact that there are plenty of ways to get interesting world coins on the cheap.

1) Remember that "interesting" is in the eye of the beholder, and you don't have to sneer at a coin just because it is common and cheap. I got hooked on coin collecting when some relatives gave me a handful of pocket change from their travels, and, to this day, you cannot convince me that a shiny brass French Marianne 20 centimes is not an amazing coin. Collect what you like to collect, and if what you like only costs 15 cents per specimen, then all that glitters is gold. If you can be content with what you can afford, then life will go better for you than a well-heeled but disgruntled double-eagle hoarder.

2) Dealers have plenty of cheap bins full of world coins, and if the specialize in domestic coinage, you can be sure that they will not have taken as much care as they could have to sift out all the better-than-poundage items. Buy a couple of Krause catalogs (outdated editions can be had cheaply on the used market), pour over them and become a cherry picker. Not only is it cheaper to find that $5-value coin in a bucket of "25 cents each/5 for $1" coins that in would be to buy it in a 2x2, it is a lot more fun and rewarding. Sure, it takes time, but have you got anywhere else to be?

3) If you are a kid or newbie collector, look for any dealers or collectors who have that teaching spirit, and take any opportunity to chat coins with them. Take any wisdom that they have to offer, and you will also find a large number of those ones who, wanting to keep the hobby alive, will either offer you nicely discounted coins or even outright give them to you. (Being a kid helps, and being a courteous kid means dealers almost throw coins at you at bourse shows.)

4) You can always save up your spare dollars and buy one of those bank bags full of poundage off of eBay. Personally, I am sort of tired of them now and my collecting interests have developed elsewhere, but I have no regrets over the hours/days spent sifting and sorting through a big bag of those coins and thumbing through Krause to look up the ones that looked different. I learned more about world history, geography, politics, and economics from doing this than I ever learned in school, and I bet most of you on this board probably could say the same.