Sorry for my ignorance I’m kind of new to this. Where’s the best place to buy coins that have a higher chance of being errors. The U.S mint rolls or bags. Or do I go to a bank and buy them there. Is it a good idea to buy the 2009 silver proof set?
All of the coins have the same origin. Mint rolls and mint bags, and rolls from a bank, all come from the same large bags distributed by the mint. So there are no better odds in searching one vs the other. That brings it down to a matter of cost. And since you will always pay a premium to obtain coins from the mint, and will pay face to obtain them from a bank - the answer should be obvious.
The banks are a great place. I can go to one of my banks and get 5 boxes of lincolns and roosies. Can you imagine shipping on that from the mint?
Where............................................. ...... ........you're better off going to the bank for the reasons stated. AND you'll NEVER get a ddo or ddr or rpm on an older coin, from the mint, usually. PLUS, the price is right and the searching is fun! you may want to print this out as an aid for searching. http://www.collectorscorner.org/pocket.html
It can be any bank, usually you will have to check many of them, and repeatedly, just to be able to get rolls of coins.
Let's put it this way - if you want to collect them because you like them, fine. If you want to collect them because you think you will make money by doing so - forget about it, it aint worth the effort.
Minor errors are everywhere, good one much harder now. Minor errors are everywhere, good one much harder now. If you really want to search for errors buy bulk, bags, rolls, accumulations of stuff nobody else wants to go through. Get these at shops, shows and estates. Searching modern stuff is going to leave you frustrated. There is just not but a fraction (of errors) coming out of the mint anymore as there once was. Reasons for this include but are not limited to bulk shipments of coins to the Fed. No more mom and pop banks process their own anymore and the shear number of them has been dramatically reduced since about the mid 1990's through much better screening. Once we bought and sold off center and double stuck BU Lincolns for a couple of dollars now they are much more. One more truth - the smaller the coin the more likely to find errors but the smaller the coin the smaller the error will be - it is much harder to find a half dollar with a big error as compared to to a dime.
But many of the better errors will not fit in a roll. You have a better chance for them in bags. But if you buy the small bags that the mint sells the premiums will eat you up so much that it is still a losing proposition. What you really need isto be able to acquire ballistic bags but that would be VERY difficult to do, and you will need a forklift to unload it and pick it up at the bank.
Conder: Exactly what I was thinking. If the OP is looking for broadstrikes, off-centers, wrong planchets, etc -- the kind of stuff I usually think of as being an error -- they won't be in rolls.
