I just aquired a handful of 1967 and 1968 Kennedy Half Dollars. They are circulated and in rather rough shape. If I were to go into a coin shop and ask to sell them to him, would I at least get melt based on the % of silver that is in each coin? Can someone help me figure out about how much to expect? Thanks
I use www.coinflation.com to answer questions like this. According to that site, the melt on those is about $2.78 each. You can probably expect a dealer to offer you a little less than that.
I have found what dealers offer for silver and gold to be all over the map, at least tho you can get a straight answer out of them, just try to find out what those cash for gold mail order places will pay. Some dealers In my experience, do not want to deal with some forms of silver, they will often times not want to deal with even old sterling canadian silver, war nickles and 40% halves, but there are many others that will deal with you, just call around.
Not bad then if I decide to put it towards a purchase in their store, maybe that will help seal the deal.
No, you will not get melt that is not reasonable No, you will not get melt that is not reasonable a reasonable offer today would be 5 times face. Remember the less pure the content (40% verses 90%) the less you receive. The dealer will not get as much from his guy when he bulks it out to him, war nicks are worse. All involved have to make some profit. The tough one to figure out is why they pay less for .925 than they do .900 and it's a very good reason and is true. Less of it, problems with world type purity, not always in coin, costs of seperating it out from .900 and not readily being a trusted commodity. .900 is the standard at least in this country all else take more of a pinch.
I originally posted this is another thread referring to 90% silver rather than 40%, but you can do the necessary arithmetic as homework: To find out the melt value of silver coins, try: http://www.coinflation.com Right now, the sort of coins described by the original poster probably have more metal than numismatic value, as all the respondents have observed. But the way the market actually works is like this: --Check out the melt value of a dime. Right now, it's about $1.33, right? (i.e., 1/5 of the melt value of each Walker). --10% of that is $0.13. --Subtract the 10% from the melt value, and you get $1.20, or 12X the face value of the dime. That's how a wholesale dealer buys 90% silver coins that have no additional numismatic value, i.e., at some multiple of face value. Usually these multiples are integral (i.e., whole numbers like 5X face or 7X face or currently, 12X face), but depending on market conditions, the multiplier can be fractional, but never less than half. I.e., the dealer could offer "five and half times face," or 7.5X face or 12.5 face. Unless you sell the coins directly to the end customer, on EBay for example, you cannot get full melt. You have to "leave enough in the deal" for the middleman.
I have used Coin Inflation before, but now I use http://www.coininfo.com/ . I don't know if this is any better than coininflation, but it's kinda good to see the graph and the value