Why is it SOOOOO hard to save up for coins?!?!?

Sorry, I meant my net real income! I do all the work myself/ I can do the work of six employees, plus I work 80 hrs+ a week for 8 months. I will probably work way past retirement age, easy money, plus it keeps one in top shape physically/mentally. I also have a butterfly/moth collection that I am selling/ trading for Imperial Roman Aurei/ then there is also a British Colonial stamp collection, that I will sell when I retire in 15 years from now.

 

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Or flip other things. I got baseball cards and comic books that has gone up in value. I can always sell those and use the money for other things... mainly coins.

 

I could spend half of my net income on coins. And the jury likely would acquit my wife on justifiable homicide.

 

If you don't have money for coins, or need to save up a war chest, I suggest buying ancient-coin books. They are cheap compared to coins and you will learn a lot which will inform your future buying. Many internet collectors don't read books, so demand for good books is down. Books published a few decades ago to an enthusiastic audience are available now for a fraction of what they are "worth" in enjoyment and information. It used to be said "Buy the book before the coin." Not anymore, or if it is, few take that advice.

Buy the book to add to your enjoyment of the coins you have and the coins you will have. You can afford really good books even when funds are short.

 

I envy and pity simultaneously those of you for whom money is the limiting factor on your collecting activities. It is equally troubling to have money set aside to buy something special but fail to find anything you really want. I am as likely to find coins I really want among the under $100 group as in the over $1000 material. That is good except for the fact that I can't just send $10,000 to a dealer and say buy me something I'd like. That was the Hunt Brothers style of collecting.

Collecting for reasons other than cash value does avoid one fact. It make no difference how much the value of a collection goes up or down unless and until it is sold. Aurei do not send quarterly dividend denarii. For those whose main desire is to prove how smart they were to buy such a good investment, the turn-around might be a matter of hours. Those of us who enjoy Scrooge McDuck style diving in our vaults full of coins we will never know, much less care whether that $100 turned into $1000 or $10.

A variation on Valentinian's subject makes me wonder: When our governments make collecting coins illegal and send all the dealer/auctioneers off to jail, how many of us will retain even a passing interest in coins? We can study fine art and architecture never expecting to buy the Mona Lisa or the Colosseum. When all I can have are the books, will I still want them?

 

It's merely a hobby to me (sure, a hobby that I hope is lucrative) ...

... but if the hobby goes tits-up and I'm left holding 500 bits of weird silver and bronze, then I guess my coin collection will be a bit like my Dad's stamp collection

=> Priceless

 

Here's a method I use when the "horrible reality" of "how much I've spent lately" on this hobby (I have several...all expensive) makes its way past my many filters on reality. I pick an auction thats just opened and bid on a bunch but judge my bids to be under the eventual hammer prices. This way I'm relieved when the hammer falls and I don't win the coins or only a few. I call this the "It could have been worse" strategy.

 

That will NEVER happen. Today, as our PM states ad nauseum, people want to join the middle class. In reality, most in Canada are in this class. However in China/India/Russia more and more are....thus these people have funds to have fun pastimes, coins/banknotes are just that. Second fact, most have lost faith in currencies, so they invest in the only real money which are coins/ banknotes/ high quality. Even the big shots in the Russian mafia/ drug cartels are coin collectors. Unfortunately, rare coins/ banknotes will keep rising way above inflation. Even if you sample collecting habits of the super rich/ Eliasberg/Garrett/Brand/Carnegie/Rockefeller/Col. Greene/Rothschild/Farouk all had gazillions in rare coins, these guys knew how to invest/ and have gobs of fun/ way better then Warren Buffett who is just sitting on his fortune....its there to be spent on enjoyment.

 

Well, I guess that depends on what kind of stamps. I still collect a bit on the side and recently just checked ebay... a dang monkey stamp from 1980 was selling for a thousand bucks, sheesh.

 

Actually selling, or just offered? We know from eBay ancient-coin offerings that there can be a whopping difference between what sellers ask and what informed buyers will pay.

I get an eBay feed about coins newly listed from a particular region. One specific coin has been offered over 100 times (I am not exaggerating, I have been following it for years) at $230. At $25 it might sell.

 

Actually selling. I wish some of my old Chinese stamps would sell for that high lol.

 

Actually selling is not even a perfect sign of value. For example, I won some coins in an auction last month which means that I was willing to pay more than anyone else. That does not mean that I could put those coins back up for sale and get my 'investment' back. There might possibly have been just one fool willing to pay that price. Valentinian's example of the coin worth $25 (maybe) is a good example of a popular business model in the hobby. You price everything at ten times a reasonable number and discount it to only 5X reasonable convincing the exactly one fool that he was getting half off rather than paying 5X. If you do this with enough coins, you might make enough money to keep it up.

I sold most of my stamps for a loss, too. All I collected were US before 1861. People with loose money prefer monkeys?

 

All the coins I've sold (mostly junk) were at a loss. Still have all my stamps, somewhere.

 

Not all but a good portion of what I've sold I'm fairly certain were at a loss, but overall everything I've sold has helped me get some really cool and rare coins I normally wouldn't have been able to afford otherwise. My only regret is not selling separately some of the coins I unloaded for my Justinian solidus. Could have stretched out my profits a little more, probably.

Now with like nothing else I'm willing to sell I might be forced one day into buying+flipping full time if I want to keep getting expensive coins lol

 

That got me at a coin show once, but I did not have any internet to do research before I pulled the trigger.

 

I do that as well, but I also keep a tally of how much I sold. As long as they're close, I don't really care how much I have spent in a given time frame. That means what I am selling is covering the cost.

Right now, my "bought" total is higher than my "sold" total, so I have completely stopped buying coins for my collection until I sell a lot more.

 

My coins all came via auctions, probably gotten coins from 40 different auctions. to come out OK you have to follow these rules....

1. Set a max. price you wish to pay for lot you are eyeing/ never go into a stupid bidding war!
2. Always try for high quality coins....these will appreciate more/ nicer to look at....

3. If you are bidding on a German site like Kunker/ German States coins will go very high/ try to secure instead European/Overseas coins.

4. When dealing with US auctions aka slabbed material/ remember that a slabbed MS-65/ might be graded as almost UNC. in Europe and sell for way less. I noted a MS-66 France/ AV 20 Frances Napoleon I/1812-A sold for 6600US/ same coin would have graded almost UNC in Germany and sold for half. At Heritage a MS-67 Souverain d'or 1796-M sold for 15K/ I got a "stempelglanz" example from Kunker for 2600 Euros/ Kunker stempelglanz=MS-67/68.
5. Some auction sites attract a lot of bidders with suit cases of $/ CNG Triton are the perfect example. Most coins go triple or more estimates. In Larry Adams sale/ some went 20X.
6. I check auction "unsold" lots, sometimes you can get lucky and score a killer deal. I recently got an FDC Souverain d'or 1800/1796 overstrike from Austrian Netherlands at starting price of 1100Euros from Slovakian auction....coin was MS-67!

 

Collectors in the US have a silly addiction to coins in slabs. They will pay stupid premiums for them just for the sake of getting one in plastic. It is some kind of false sense of security thing.

 

You are so right! I remember CNG had a coin that they graded EF/ 6 months later that same coin....now slabbed, by some miracle became a MS-65 GEM in a Heritage Auction. With "hammered" coins its even worse, I saw a MS-62 that would have not made a "sehr schon" =VF in Kunker auction. In the Stack's/ Bowers Pogue sale (US gold coins all the finest known) the prices realized were astronomical, in cases a MS-66 sold hundreds of thousands more then a 65!

 

I can't spend a huge amount of money on coins, I have to pay for house, cars, kids, stuff like that. I've never spent more than 150 bucks on a single coin! LOL! There are so many interesting coins to collect for less than 200 bucks, it really doesn't bug me at all to stay in that price range. I'm never going to own an aureus, but that's ok with me. When I go coin shopping, I have a hard time choosing the one i want that is in my price range....there are so many!