I started coin collecting as a young boy. At age 10 or so I managed to land a paper route. Every week after collecting from my customers I would look through the change and fill empty holes in Whitman cent and nickel albums. My dad encouraged this as a way of saving, which turned out to be the case because I never spent any of the coins in those albums.
I started in January of this year. At first I bought some silver bars and rounds at an LCS. I started asking the owner about his coins and the next thing I knew I bought a Morgan and a Walker. Going to my first coin club meeting tomorrow night.
Anyone with a decent sense of taste gravitates to bourbon naturally. Me, I dug an 1861 IHC out of the ground in my front yard while playing Matchboxes in the late 1960's. It was so_cool that I can still picture that long-gone coin in my mind. Our local soil had bleached it nearly white. After a long break to (sort of) become an adult, my entrepreneurial streak brought me back around to them when I discovered that pawn shops near my Army post paid so little for stuff - and sold the stuff for so little in return - that I could buy there and resell to some city pawn shops at a profit. That gave me a feel for what was/wasn't really worth it, in general, about coins. Fast forward a few years, to the early 2000's when my perverse sense of gift-giving led me to buy my (then) wife a couple of DMPL Morgans and a couple of gold $2.5's for Christmas. The moment I opened that first slabbed DMPL, it was all over for me, and I haven't been in any sort of control since.