Good morning! There may already be discussions going on about this topic, but I will start another as I just returned home from a six-week trip. Silver is over $93 an ounce and I left when it was in the $70's. Wow. As a student, I have not put a lot of money into my collection for a while but rather see it as fluid. I buy and sell when there is profit to be made, although I have a small pile that I really don't want to sell. My wife's lack of interest in the hobby keeps me limited. My collector's heart still has a hard time as seeing everything as fluid! I mean, what do you do when you stumble on a 1901 S quarter?! You gotta keep it at least a year....! In any case, I get my pleasure out of helping my dad build his collection. The family joke is that I will inherit it one day, so I am building my own inheritance. If that is true, I wouldn't mind, but in the present, a shared interest in coins has been a great connecting point for us. His interest is very broad, while mine has been more focused. His foreign coin collection fills a large gun safe, and he collects dates and mint marks of every US coin in any condition. I have generally focused on type in only higher grades. He gives me lists of coins he is missing, and when I stumble across something he needs, I generally sell it to him at my cost (family, you know). As I have helped him, I try to feed him only higher-grade coins. However, as silver rises, premiums get wiped out. Take for example an average Roosevelt dime collection or Franklin half dollar book. There aren't really any key dates, so premiums go into condition instead of scarcity. I find this very interesting. A year ago, most average circulated coins cost melt, and better grades just a hair over. Now everything appears to follow the ebb and flow of the spot price. I get the feeling that collecting has now turned into hoarding. If someone were to begin collecting coins, it seems like now is a good time to buy higher grade specimens at spot. I am not sure when premiums will rise again, but I don't see it currently. I wonder then, is it better to focus on rarer dates that have not been touched by the silver tide yet? My dad has even asked me about selling lower grade coins and using the money to buy higher grade ones. That sounds like a good idea. Anyway, there are a few meandering thoughts.
It's hard to collect a regular silver quarter when it costs more than $16. I like collecting ASEs. I used to buy 7 per $200, then 5, then 3, now less than 2. It was cool get open the mail and pull out 5 more ASEs. Now it's gonna be one or two.
There's a reason I sold my very casual and not quite complete Washington Quarter album recently. It was one of those "back burner" projects for me. The song of silver spot price soaring made me part with it. I'll play with "junk" silver again some other day, perhaps. The money I made off the sale of that album will go towards something else in my primary collection.
Yes, as a casual collector myself, it's hard to pull the trigger on circulated pieces these days. I really wish I had completed my AU Peace dollar set years ago. I need 3 (you can guess which 3 they are) but put off acquiring them... I still amuse myself with other series, and the occasional purchase of something nice, but not like the old days.
I have been culling down even a lot of my world date runs. I'll rebuild them someday, either with average condition, melt value coins once spot falls, or more slowly and with high quality coins if it stays high. I do keep type examples and any dates that I feel would be hard to replace, but I'd rather have the money while the opportunity is here than, say, every date of 1950s-60s Dutch 1 Gulden.
"Relative scarcity" of Roosevelt dimes washed out when silver hit five dollars an ounce, and people were still filling albums of those when silver was $30-40/ounce. I can see album collecting becoming less popular, but I don't see it going away any time soon. I was proud and a little ashamed of myself for finishing an album of Barber halves. I got a lot of the key dates from large eBay lots, where I certainly overpaid for the keys relative to the then-current price of silver. And that was when silver was still coming down from the 2011 peak, so I was way under water on that set and all the leftover tubes of culls and commons. Today, not so much. (When I was selling off a lot of silver for small profits ~10 years ago, I couldn't bring myself to let go of those tubes of Barbers, especially since people were offering less for them due to wear-induced silver loss. At today's prices, maybe it's time.)
