I bought a complete set of merks in a severely water stained blue Whitman album once for $60. Every hole filled. Most better dates were so slick I never looked at them I just pulled them out and put all in a plastic tube.
Pretty worn, bet it paid for plenty of meals during the great depression. Interesting side note. One of the popular food items widely offered and consumed during the great depression were baked onions stuffed with peanut butter. Never heard of that "dish" before.
Sounds unappealing, but if I hadn't had anything to eat for a day or two, and wasn't sure where my next meal was coming from? Heck yeah.
Been there, done that. In my situation what pulled me through was a 10 pound sack of Jasmine rice, a large bottle of Kikkoman soy sauce and my Japanese one piece Zojirushi rice cooker.
To finish a collection? If so… yay! If not. Well… hey so here’s a true story. Before I got into numismatics, or should I say — before I knew what the hell I was doing, one day I was desperate for some cash and decided to auction off a set of 7 mercury dimes (which originally had the following coins: 1917, 1925, 1934, 1935-D, 1936-S, 1945, and a 1945-D (FB). However, after I had sold it, I realized that I had should not have listed the 1945-D as having full bands. So, I decided to thrown in a random Merc for free, as I didn’t want to get dinged by Ebay for false information. (BTW, I DIDN’T HAVE A CLUE AS TO WHAT ANYTHING WAS WORTH). I asked the buyer to pick from a list of 20 or so Merc dimes that I had in a sealed capsule. She picked the 1916-D (which — no offense, was in far better shape than this one. It was likely a VF 25-35. Yep. And all of this the buyer was able to get for a whopping $11. Learned my lesson.
