Wanted to post this somewhere, and I figured since this set was mostly completed with coin roll hunting, may as well post it here. Finished the full date and mintmark set (not counting proofs) of Jefferson nickels from 1938 to 2025! Last two I just bought, 1939-S & 1944-S. May still hunt nickels for the heck of it, see if I can find more war nickels, buffalo nickels, foreign coins, proofs, errors, and whatever else is worth saving. But it might be time to move on to dimes. Those are tougher but I already have all 1965-2025 clad Roosevelt dimes, not counting a spare 1996-W for the album. Every other Roosevelt dime I still need is silver.
I’ve built 3 circulation sets and I take pride in that over my uncirculated set. But for me, collecting started out with my paper routes and things I found. Buying didn’t seem fair back then and I didn’t have the means anyway. But for some series, finding every coin in circulation is impossible. I didn’t consider that then. In the end, by whatever means, collecting is a personal definition.
Great job @Troodon - way to go! The fact you only had to buy two is incredible. I have followed your posts; you went through a LOT of boxes to get them.
You want to find silver dimes to fill an album? Pretty sure you won't do it roll hunting. You can, though, buy bulk silver dimes from APMEX or Provident or some other bullion sellers. edit to add: that's how I did it.
I only collect regular issue coins. Coins that were released for general circulation. So, I don't count Proofs, either. Now, I do have a few Proofs that I've ran across, either found in circulation, or priced very cheap (that's me, cheap), but I don't count them in my area of collecting. I've completed my Jefferson Nickels through 1986. I've recently began to fill in from there forward.
To be fair I did receive 1950-D & 1938-D as gifts, but all but 4 still feels like an accomplishment. Will also confess that the 1973 & 1973-D nickels in there came out of a 1973 uncirculated set I broke open for the 2 Eisenhower dollars that only came from that set. But I already had the 1973 & 1973-D nickels pulled from roll hunting, so I don't consider that "cheating" lol. Whenever I found one I already had, but in better condition, I would trade it out, and consider this just doing that basically.
No, but I don't consider those to "count." For me a complete set is every issue intended for circulation. Will usually also include any other business strikes, even if they weren't intended for circulation (for example, the 2019-W business strike in Lincoln cents, 1970-D Kennedy half dollars, etc.), but "matte finish" doesn't qualify as that as far as I'm concerned. And I'll be honest, I've seen matte finish coins and they just don't seem like anything special; I wouldn't have known there was anything different about them if someone hadn't said so. I would have included the 2020-W uncirculated nickel, had it been made, but it never actually ended up getting made and only exists in proof and reverse-proof. I do have the 2020-W proof but as a separate thing I don't count as part of this set. I do also have a handful of loose proof Jefferson nickels I found doing roll hunting: 1973-S, 1974-S, 1986-S, 2003-S, 2005-S American Bison, 2005-S Ocean in View, and 2007-S. For Roosevelt dimes I do intend on including 1996-W but not going to include the proofs or reverse proofs (though I do own the 2 reverse proofs separately in the sets they came in.)
It's not impossible... but I've found, on average, about 2 silver dimes per BOX (2500 dimes. I felt incredibly lucky the one time I found 5 silver dimes in the same box, and some of them were dates I already had. So... finding them all for face value isn't impossible, but it would take a long time lol. I may try to get some bulk lots of random silver Roosevelts some time but that's kind of pricey (but still cheaper than buying them individually). Silver war nickels were surprisingly not that hard to find and only had to resort to buying one of them (1944-S) to finish the set. I find not as many people seem to care about those, if they even know about them. (Ironically silver war nickels actually have the most silver content per dollar of face value of any circulating US silver coin, but silver stackers seem mostly not interested in them and my local coin store didn't want to buy my extras. So I'll hang on to the extras of those.) P.S. Lincoln cents are almost finished too, but the 4 I'm still missing are basically the rarest ones: 1909-S, 1909-S VDB, 1914-D, & 1922 plain.
You could knock that down to three easily. The 1922 is not an intentional regular issue, but could be considered either a variety or a mint error, considering how you feel about worn-out dies. Some folks think it is part of the full set, others do not. I ignored it and saved the money for something else.
Agree 100% - you can find them, but it will take a while. I went through about 5,400 to find 7, by chance no duplicates. There are 48 regular issue silver Roosevelts, with a few mintages around 12 million or so, but no rarities. I think you went through 31 boxes of nickels to get what you did; it will take more than that to find all 48, but I think you can do it!
I suppose you could argue it's not an intentional issue, because no Mint employee decreed not to put a mintmark on them (all 1922 pennies were actually minted in Denver), but nobody said that 1922 pennies without mintmarks should be rejected for lacking the mintmark, so... kind of counts. To me "error" means the coin has some defect that, if a Mint employee caught it, they would reject it from being issued. Enough of the 1922's with no mintmark were made they clearly didn't care enough about it to reject it, so in my book that qualifies as a "variety." Besides, my book, made by Dansco, has a space for it, so... have to put something there, or it doesn't look finished. Ironically my dime album doesn't have a space for 1996-W but I still consider it to count. I had to put it at the end because otherwise I'd have to scribble out and change all the labels from 1996 to 2026. (Technically because of the 250th anniversary, 2026 dimes won't be Roosevelt dimes, but I'm still putting them in the album anyway.)
I found 8 in 4 boxes (so out of 10,000 dimes) which is a success rate of 0.08% which some people say is pretty lucky lol. But every silver dime, worth about $2.50, you can find for $0.10, is a pretty good profit margin. But yeah would take a really long time to find every regular silver issue that way. So far I have 13 out of the 48 silver issues (not all were found roll-hunting; some were given to me, or I found in circulation years before I got a Roosevelt dime album). If I can still average 2 silver dimes a box (assuming no duplicates) in theory I could still finish the set faster than the nickel set, in terms of number of boxes. The only downside to this is dime boxes cost $250 each so cash flow makes it more difficult to go through. Side note: the rarest regular issue Roosevelt dime was 1955, that still had a mintage of 12 million (technically the rarest business strike is 1996-W, but as it was not intended for circulation I wouldn't count it as a "regular issue".) It's a stretch to say any Roosevelt dime is a "key." So it's not like silver Roosevelt dimes are rare... they're just very rare in circulation or bank boxes. But that does make finding them feel very special!
Yes, numismatics is cool because you can choose what you collect and why. Choose errors, or not. Varieties, or not. Only silver? Only up to 1964? Only Barbers, or Colonials? It’s all good and finding just the right thing can make you happy. Like this:
