Do you know the approximate value of your collection?

Best answer here.

I have found the best way to keep track of this stuff if you really want to know real time value with updated precious metals pricing is to build your own spreadsheets. I have several different spreadsheets ranging from my bullion and junk silver to my Washington Quarter Registry Set, over to mexican Pesos. All pages have individual prices that add up the totals at the bottom, and those totals are all added together on my summary report.

Its pretty neat how all of that works. I just wish I could build something that automatically looked up the values from Numismedia or some other fairly accurate price list.

 

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I think I've probably spent close to $150,000 on my "stuff" ..... but if I give it to an auction to sell, they take 15% of the hammer-price, plus they take another 15% of the buyer's slice ... ummm, so if I decide to sell in a hurry, I'll probably get a maximum of (85/115) * $150,000 = $110,000 ..... max ... probably closer to $100,000

... *sigh* ...

Yah, I'm betting that my collection is probably worth 2/3 of what I paid (ummm, which really isn't too bad compared to most other dude's hobbies, right?) ... honestly, you don't really get much back if your hobby is golfing, off-road play, etc, etc ... it is fairly difficult to get money back for old used machines and equipment ...

So, even though I'm not getting much exercise doing this "stuff", at least I know that I'm buying "money" ... and hopefully somebody else is gonna want it (I'm just hoping that they're gonna want it as badly as I wanted it when I bought it!!)

 

My eating habits may be slightly more extreme than that.

 

Heck, could have spent it on pipe tobacco, booze, and candy and seen nothing in return.

Wait a second......done that too.

 

Me too, saw a return on some of it, some I wish could unsee, some see again.

 

Heck Hommer. It's either all up in smoke or down the toilet........

 

lol

 

That's nice. I did one very similar with tabs for different things including a totals tab at the end. Yours sounds a lot better than mine. I'd be interested to know how you connected it to live bullion updates. That's half the battle of trying to track the value. I have a phone app that I use that does that but not my excel program.
Numsimatic prices vary quite a bit. Difficult to have anything that could cover as broad of a range as needed.
If I bought a gold $5 for $430, I might list its value at $400. I figure it'd sell for that, maybe more. If it would actually sell some day for $370, then $400 was still a reasonably fair valuation. No way to get everything nailed down to the penny. I try to keep a rough idea though. I do enter buy prices.

 

I highly doubt the IRS is going to be persuaded by a list of numbers in a Google sheet. I don't have any form of receipt for most of my stuff.

 

MyBullionTracker works great for just keeping track of your PM's. Live pricing, enter what you paid, etc.
https://bullion.nwtmint.com/mybulliontracker.php

 

Unless your collection is worth millions I wouldn't worry about the irs.

 

holy cow dude you are rich. how many years have you been collecting coins ? 100 ? lol me only 17 years.

 

My personal collection is a perhaps a couple thousand. I got the bulk of my collection from Gramps.
Total value: about 42 grand. Thanks Grampa! Not a bad net worth for a 20 year old dude...

 

At that age... might be wise to sell half of it off and put it in some good mutual funds. Open up a Roth IRA. The more you add now.... the better down the road. Might not be a popular answer on the coin boards though..

 

I'm thinking of doing so. However, lots (aka half) of it is in bullion, so I'm not sure if it's smarter to hold on to that or sell. I've been hearing that gold is going down in value, so I don't know whether to sell the gold now while it's still high, or just hold on to it for my retirement fund...

 

Gold doesn't earn interest or pay dividends.

 

Your cost is $0, so anything you sell is 100% profit. IMO, you'll be much better off putting the money in a mutual fund.

There are plenty of investment calculators on the web. For example, if you put $20K in a mutual fund that earns you 10% return, in 10 years, it would be worth >$51K.

 

How is his cost zero?

His taxable basis may be zero, since all distributions are fully taxable as ordinary income.
But he did contribute real dollars, yet any taxable gains and losses are not calculated.

 

All this stuff is going way over my head!

My theory with the gold and silver:
In the event of a Great Depression or total economy collapse (read: Apocalypse), precious metal will be worth something, while paper money and other things tied to the American economy will be worth nothing. So in a Mad Max scenario, I can continue to survive for some time...

 

hey, mister, what can I get with this here AU Barber quarter?