Hi, I'm not a collector, as such, but my husband and I have been tossing change in a container for about 16 years and have finally decided to roll and cash it all in. As we go through this process should I be watching for any certain coins? (to uninformed to even be called a nube!)
Starting out 1. Run, don't walk, to the nearest coin store or reasonably large book store and buy the 2004 edition of the Red Book - A Guide Book of United States Coins. 2. Read pages 5-14. 3. Re-read pages 5-14. 4. Read pages 5-14 again. 5. Read the Red Book section on a single denomination and list the rare, unusual or “different” date/mint mark combinations with higher than normal values. Pay particular attention to the information on grading that denomination. 6. Read pages 5-14. 7. Pull all coins of your chosen denomination from the jar, sort them by date and mint mark, grade and inventory them (Excel or Access worksheets work great). 8. Re-read pages 5-14. 9. Look up the values and add them to your inventory. 10. Pick another denomination and repeat steps 4-9. Keep doing this until you are finished. (You can skip step 9 until you have finished the other steps for the entire project.) There is an old adage among coin collectors - buy the book before the coin. It is a wonderful guide to successful collecting! As you go through each step: ENJOY! (You probably won't find much, if any silver . The mint stopped issuing silver coins for circulation after 1964, and by the mid-late '80s when you started your hoard they had virtually disappeared from circulation. )
Good advice overall, but one little quibble: half dollars. Periodically, I'll buy all the rolled half dollars a bank has on hand and sort them. This past week, when I had plenty of time, I went through 51 rolls and came up with 4 rolls (minus two coins) of 40% silver halves, dated 1965 through 69. The 1970 40% halves were struck in Denver as business strikes but went out in mint sets exclusively and I didn't find any of that year this time. One of the tellers at the bank came over with six halves while I was getting the rolls and offered them. Three of them were 40% silvers. It's rarer to find 90% silver halves in the rolls, but not unheard of. There's a whole generation of adults out there who were born after the 90% coins were out of production and many haven't ever heard that our coinage was once real money. Some of them find their dad's change jar after he's passed on and roll the coins for deposit in their banks. When I have time, it's fun to get a big tray of rolls and go through them. One roll I opened had five sandwich metal halves and the rest were 40%. My six year old daughter is very good at finding the silver halves and enjoyed going through this most recent batch which was the first I've sorted since she was big enough to help. Counting rooms have fewer people handling more coins and so more old coin is finding its way back out into the stores and banks when it gets back into circulation.
theres still a chance of finding old coins in change today, even after they go through design changes, ive found a 1941 and a 1909 v.d.b wheatie cent in change at a supermarket and ive also recieved a liberty head nickel in change (the cashier must have thought it was a dime).
We called those "V nickels" when I was a kid. They do indeed still show up from time to time. A lady was telling me about getting rolls of silver dimes in payment at a grocery store when some of her elderly customers rolled their change and took it in to spend. On the last page of Coin Values (formerly Trends) there's a table showing the melt value of US silver coins and cautioning people not to turn them in for face value. The table is handy, but the caution from the editors made me wonder if maybe there are some people collecting the modern junk metal coins who don't know that silver is valuable. I guess I wouldn't be surprised to learn that's the case.
