I was looking at prices for raw ancients on Vcoins and a few other places and I’ve noticed they seem to be way cheaper raw than slabbed. Now I’m considering just buying raw ancients and sending them in to be slabbed myself xD. Why pay $500 for a slabbed coin if you can pay $250 for it raw and then like $30 for grading and save a bunch of money? Of course this logic only implies if the raw coins I buy are guaranteed by the seller. Idk if Vcoins and sites like it do that?
I always buy coins based on their merits, regardless of being slabbed or not. I will not buy a coin, however desirable in my view, that is slabbed, if I think it is being priced beyond what I would pay for it raw. Some slabbed coins I have, but the vast majority are raw or coins removed from their slabs. Somewhere down the line before my brain totally turns into tapioca pudding, I'll probably remove the remaining slabbed coins from their plastic sarcophaguses.
Authenticity is all I care about for the guarantee . I should be able to determine the grade myself or at least get pretty close. Like misidentifying a VF coin as AU would be an expensive mistake but I don’t think I would make it.
I kind of do the same but I do take the slab cost into account. If a coin is worth $500 raw and then they send it into NGC and pay a $30 grading fee I would pay them $530 for it. But if it’s $500 raw I wouldn’t pay them $1,000 just because it’s slabbed. I have an NGC membership so I can send coins in myself to be slabbed and it’s not THAT expensive. I would recommend it for coins that cost over $1,000.
Oh I will still definitely send them in to be slabbed just because I can stack them in my safe easier instead of dealing with trays. I think slabbing is great when a collector plans to sell. I would expect the inheritor of a large raw ancient coin collection to send them in for slabbing just because they would sell for a lot more. If the inheritor doesn’t care about coins they aren’t going to care about touching them and they might as well maximize the price they get. But my point is that I’m not going to pay any more than $30 extra for a slabbed coin over a raw coin of the same quality and type because that’s about what it costs to send them in for grading & slabbing and I can do that myself especially since I’m already paying for an NGC membership.
I’m not sure about ancients to be honest. I know that PCGS charged me $15 to have my 2021 Morgan Dollars graded and I know NGC is cheaper because they were charging like $12. I imagine ancients might cost more but I don’t think it’s as much as $70.
Correction: I found the grading fee page. https://www.ngccoin.com/submit/services-fees/ngc-ancients/ It’s $45 to have an ancient graded if the value is $3,000 or less. It’s $28 to have an ancient graded if the value is $300 or less. It’s $110 to have an ancient coin graded if the value is $3,000-$10,000. All of my coins are $3,000 or less so I’d most likely be paying $45 if I bought a raw coin to send it in for grading. Thus I would probably pay $60 over the value of the coin raw to buy a coin already slabbed. The $15 extra is just because it saves me the time & effort of submitting the coin and I don’t have to lose possession of it for a few months to have it graded.
I have an 1808 US half dollar that I contemplated sending off to NGC for grading and slabbing. I found the process thoroughly confusing. I think it was on that that they were going to charge $70; I didn't go through with it. How was your experience with the NGC submission process? It seemed to me that they needed to update their website in a bad way; there seemed to be some discrepancies between the grading tier page and the options given on their submission form.
I am an NGC member but their submission form was more complicated so I joined and submitted through PCGS xD. I’ve never submitted to NGC. I’m just a member. As for the PCGS submission it’s a bit tedious but I was happy with the results.
Aaron Berk was cmplaining in one of his recent podcasts that it had cost him 4000$ to get a Pantakipion stater slabbed And NGC had added a handling fee of 10$ on top of that!
With high value coins like that I wouldn’t be surprised if they spent up to an hour grading that one single coin. Whereas I think for low value coins they go through several per minute. High value coins tend to have low populations and they don’t want to skew their population reports.
There’s something I can’t explain and that’s the feeling I get when I’m holding that raw coin in my hand. I just don’t get that feeling when it’s slabbed. Probably has something to do with history and wondering who touched this?
That makes total sense and I understand why a lot of people don’t slab them. However if you were passing down your collection to a spouse or child who wasn’t interested in coins in that case I would recommend slabbing them for maximum retail value. At least the higher valued ones. Obviously some will not be worth slabbing even to sell. But if that person wanted to keep them and enjoy them it might be a different story.
