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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;ewomack, post: 25263904, member: 15588&quot;]Yes. A thousand times yes. Experiencing and learning the selling process is the true key to this hobby. Doing so will save much heartache and confusion down the road.</p><p><br /></p><p>This same advice has appeared on this forum numerous times in the past decade and it&#039;s advice worth repeating over and over again. I agree completely that no one really knows the true (monetary) worth of their coins until the time to sell arrives. Selling, for many, will probably be a very humbling and eye opening experience. It certainly was, and remains so, for me. Some coins that seemed fantastic, beautiful, and brimming with value turned out unsellable, except at a loss or at a pathetically small profit. Others acquired merely to fill a hole, or purely by chance, end up making money, but usually not very much.</p><p><br /></p><p>Once in a while, what looks like &quot;a profit&quot; appears, but the time value of money or other factors (shipping, etc.) reduce the profits to specks. Many of the &quot;gains&quot; I&#039;ve seen from selling coins ended up mostly reducible to time value of money (a concept that <i>everyone</i> should know). Roughly, a coin I bought for $20 in 2010 and sold for $30 in 2024 has really only kept up with inflation. Its value hasn&#039;t really increased, or it at least increased at an insignificant rate. Selling coins for less than what you paid for them, especially when unloading them a decade or more later, can be a truly heartbreaking experience.</p><p><br /></p><p>Many people simply love coins - I do - but the expectation of increased value likely undergirds the ambition of many who enter the hobby. Why else does the coin press generally emphasize great rarities, high and record-breaking auction prices, someone who happened to find a rare piece in pocket change, etc. The lure of riches probably lures many people into this hobby, whether they enjoy coins as coins or not. It&#039;s good that many people over the years have openly said on this forum that &quot;coins are a terrible investment,&quot; because they really are. More than likely, money spent on coins, especially coins not considered &quot;investment grade,&quot; is outright wasted money. One has to enjoy the things enough to sustain what could add up to great losses. Given that, if you&#039;re not already financially stable, <i>do not</i> look to coins to make money. A very small number of people have hit the jackpot in the past, but with odds not much better than playing the lottery.</p><p><br /></p><p>The coins that make <i>big money</i>, or &quot;investment grade&quot; coins, can cost thousands of dollars, often have <i>intense </i>rarity or desirability, and get bought and sold by people who have that kind of money to throw around. That kind of buying and selling takes place at a level of the hobby <i>way beyond</i> the vast majority of the discussions on this forum. For example, I remember a coin video blog some years ago featuring a dealer saying that a certain coin priced at $32,000 was &quot;an absolute steal.&quot; Yes, <i>that particular coin</i> would very likely increase in value over time, because it had true, organic rarity. But the barriers to entry for that piece were obviously astronomical and <i>far beyond</i> the vast majority of collectors.</p><p><br /></p><p>The experience of selling coins led me to buy fewer coins overall. It taught me that, if I&#039;m going to buy something, I had better <i>absolutely love it</i> or it had better have some kind of obvious value of some sort to add it to my pile. It also taught me that loving coins <i>too much</i> could simply lead me to wasting my money. I love coins, but I don&#039;t want them to bankrupt me or put me in dangerous financial straits. They&#039;re not <i>that</i> great. Also, it seems to have forever removed the coin hoarder instinct in me. It made me into, I believe, a much more savvy and cautious collector. I&#039;m pretty sure that most of the coins I buy will <i>still</i> lose money in the long run, but I buy far fewer and am much pickier, so I tend to buy coins that I still enjoy five or more years later. I&#039;ve wasted a lot of money on this hobby. I don&#039;t intend to waste any more.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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