I only recently started collecting specific types and because of that... after learning about all of the little flaws you could find in coins... I now think back... HOW MANY GOOD COINS HAVE I MISSED OVER THE YEARS... I can remember when I was 5 or so taking what I believe was an easter basket full of pennys and traiding them in for rock hard grean backs.. which i spent on what else??? more candy . Not sure how the rest of you feel on this but it kind of striked me not to long ago heheheh Guess I have a lot of catching up to do.... Mach
Not to worry, Mach. There are still plenty of good and interesting coins to be had. Good luck searching.
This question isn't as hard to answer as you might think. The average consumer who uses a credit card but makes cash purchases for small amounts is recieving an average of about one gem coin per year. This will generally be the current year but can be up to three years old. He will also get about five cents in silver each year and about thirty recent date coins of higher grade or better varieties. There have been no numismatically valuable old coins in circulation since the last of them were removed by collectors in 1959. In fact by 1975 all the old coins had been removed from circulation. Some of these like common wheats and '40's nickels do come back into circulation from time to time but they have been set aside at least once in the past. A few better dates like the '39-D nickel will also get back into circulation but the average consumer won't run into such coins. You'll also get a nice error coin about every five years though with recent quality control improvements this is likely to decrease. While the rarest coins one finds now have no premium there is a premium for many of the modern varieties and errors and this will total perhaps twenty dollars per year or so. Lest anyone think that searching change is pointless though it should be remembered that these coins are being depleted in circulation. Where that may be of no consequence for the older coins since there were mountains of uncs saved when they were issued, what about the moderns? Right now a bag of circulated quarters from 1984 would have about a five hundred dollar premium just on the basis of three or four dates in the bag still in unc. But what about the many '84 type "d"s in the bag and the choice AU 1977's? Many of these coins no longer exist in circulation and at some point this will be recognized. At some point a bag of quarters from 1984 will have a huge premium, but ironically the very last one was probably destroyed by being spent way back in the late '80's or early '90's.
