Or would you rather buy an uncirculated 1974S Lincoln cent and a proof 1974S Lincoln for $6.95 for both?
That's about $27 in today's money. Amazing how silver preserves value. $27 is what an average Morgan cost these days.
I believe the back page ad in COINage magazine gave away a free, BU 1921 Morgan dollar with every silver dollar order of $50 or more. As a kid, I ordered from them a few times to get those free Morgan dollars.
The 74-S cents were heavily hoarded at a time when copper was high already and there was talk of replacing them with aluminium - so the price there is insane by todays standards. The 75-S proof was high then also, like $20 per, but now about $2 per.
That's really neat that you found that magazine. I used to have a Red Book back when I was a kid...I wish that I would have saved it.
My first daughter was born in November of '74. Also, the big bad strike at UPS ended with the contract being ratified and we all headed back to work. Lean times and happy times.........
Well, I'd be a little bit sore about how silver dollars I bought five years later (end of 1979/beginning of 1980) "preserved their value". Or, for that matter, the ones I bought in 2011. It's a shame I wasn't paying attention to the market in 1980. I didn't have a big collection then, but I could've probably come up with $10 FV or so that I would've been willing to part with. At 36x FV, that would've been a nice grub stake to put into CDs when interest rates were in double-digits -- I could've bumped it up to $600 or so by 1984, and then added that to the IRA I opened that year. I put everything into AWSHX -- $2K in each of 1984 and 1985, I think (maybe it was 1983 and 1984). In any event, that $4K initial investment is now worth almost $45K, so my $600 from the silver would've been worth something like $6700 today. Of course, market timing is for fools. How could I have known the right time to sell off the silver? Well, if I'd cashed it in in 1984, after silver had fallen back to $6, I would've gotten maybe $40 for it. That $40, put into the same mutual fund, would now be around $450. Instead, I've got the silver. How much value has it "preserved"? A bit under $140, as of this evening. If I'd sold it off at the very peak of silver's most recent spike, I could've gotten about $350 for it -- but, again, that would have required perfect timing. There's a time for preserving value. But I'm glad I didn't focus on "preserving" value when I opened that IRA.
Well I guess I can see that, but here is one for you. I can buy a gallon of gas for a little over 25 cents today, that same quarter in 1964 is worth $3.43 today. That is called preservation of wealth to me.
There's an element of preservation, but also an element of coincidence. In early 1980, that quarter could've bought NINE gallons of gas. In 1982, it might've bought ONE gallon. Over the span from 1985 to 2005, silver mostly stayed around $5.00 per ounce, making that quarter worth 90 cents. During that same time, crude oil fluctuated wildly (below $10/bbl in the winter of 98-99, up to $50/bbl in 2005); gas prices didn't fluctuate quite that much, but I do have records of buying gas in 1999 for something like 70 cents/gallon, and I know it was at least double that a year or two earlier, and triple that by 2005. So, depending on when you're making the statement, that quarter might've preserved its value relative to gas, or increased its value ninefold, or actually lost some value. Meanwhile, in 1984, $2.20 would've bought one gallon of milk or two gallons of gas. Put that money into the mutual fund, and today it would buy a bit less than seven gallons of gas, or about the same amount of milk. Did it go up 11 times (as indicated by its nominal dollar value), or 3.5 times (relative to gas), or 7 times (relative to milk)?
Allenbaugh collected aviation themes and was very annoyed someone produced a P-40 Warhawk that looked like a Tomahawk. He said if the folks producing aviation art medals/bars today [70's] had designed the first flying machine they would have produced a skate board.
