Digging out my old European album and started plugging some older stuff into search engines and this one seemed to get my attention. Is this coin as valuable as some guides indicate or am I seeing something else? Thanks for any help. Sorry for the poor pics, just put it on the scanner bed and didn't dig out the good camera.
The 1 DM coin is "somewhat" rare with that year/mintmark combination, yes. But as with all coins, especially modern ones, another decisive factor is condition. For a 1954 G in BU you would have to pay almost €1,000 here (1955 G would be even more). But the pieces that did circulate are quite common ... sorry, expect a price/value in the one-digit area. Christian
Thanks for the information. That's about what I expected. I saw a book value showing an XF at about $450US but I didn't assume this would go XF and I couldn't find a grading guide for European. Single digits makes it more valuable than all but my melt value coins
You might know more about it than I but I believe this $450 price is based on European grading. An XF will be a very nice lightly circulated coin. It will have lots of luster. Usually their XF will include most coins from the best XF's all the way to MS-60 but excludes poorly made and mishandled coins. Their Unc tends to start at what we call MS-61. Poorer coins are downgraded to VF. I don't know what this coin is worth in XF but I do know it is scarce above what we call VF. The coin pictured is a solid, albeit low end, VF. As such I agree it's worth less than $10 probably but I don't keep up with these markets.
FWIW, in condition similar to the OPs coin 54 G's and 55 G's (a bit scarcer) could still be found in pocket change in Germany into the late 90's. I myself picked up a few that way to keep as mementoes before the switch to the euro in 2001. These dates are scarce and priced accordingly, at least in Germany, only in grades equivalent to the U.S MS 60 and better. They really need to be uncirculated with luster remaining for people to pay anywhere near catalogue prices.
This statement is extremely misleading. No doubt there were a few '54-G's still in circulation in this grade in the late-'90's before they were all melted down but the facts is that you'd have to look at more than 500 1 mark coins just to find one of this date and when you found it there is a high chance that it was a cull and abn even even higher chance it was in much lower grade. I doubt one in twenty of the date would have been in this grade. Probably 60% of the mintage was already lost or destroyed even before the balance was melted. No, this coin is hardly tough in VF but it is extremely tough in AU and higher and what they call "AU" is what the XF price in Krause really is. My understanding is that the XF price is high but nice examples bring good money even with light wear or other problems because they just haven't been available sine the early '70's and in those days no one saved any. The reason for the low price of VF's isn't that the world is awash in them. The reason is that there is almost no demand even for Uncs and even less demand for VF's. German moderns have had some demand for years now and the prices rocketed higher many years ago. But this demand still lacks much depth.
The truth is somewhere in between methinks. Such a coin in "ss" (roughly VF) is worth €8 according to the current (1/2014) MünzenRevue price guide, and €980 in "st" (roughly BU). According to that source, prices for other grades are vz: €170, vz-st: €600 ... and maybe realistic market prices are below those amounts. By the way, saying that "they were all melted down" is, umm, extremely misleading. About 24 billion DM coins have not been returned so far (data from late November 2013), worth €3.5 billion. Christian
Thanks for the info. I prefer to think of "they were all melted down" as simple hyperbole. It was used to highlight the fact that in the late '90's one could go to the bank and get large quantities of one mark coins to search for the '54-G but now this "universe" of coins is gone. No matrter what grade you seek you'll need another source and the typical family with a few old German coins will have very few high denomination coins and no '54-G's. Indeed, most people would have cashed in most or all of their high denomination coins. The vast majority of those 24 billion unredeemed coins are coins that have been lost or destroyed over the decades and many of the ones that do still survive are low denomination that aren't worth the effort to redeem. I'd be surprised if more than several thousand of the '54-G survive and the vast majority of them are in VG or F condition. Time has been, is, and will likely continue to be brutal to moderns. They were never loved, they wore out, and now many are being melted. Even still the interest in them is very muted. This is changing but it's changing more slowly than I'd have ever predicted. The fact that copper nickel "junk made" in large numbers can have price tags in the hundreds or thousands of dollars proves that it's changing. When I started looking for these coins they listed for a few dollars each and you couldn't find them. The only change is now they list ay higher prices and they are still elusive but can be tracked down by internet.
I checked eBay to see what was available and am somewhat surprised. Mostly because they are hard to find here as well. Also there's one now in a nice AU (high end XF) with a BIN of only $50.
As for the coins that have not been redeemed so far, well, they will either be in collections (such as mine ) or "lost" somewhere. Actually the number of coins I mentioned translates to about 55 percent - so roughly half of the coins, value wise, have not been turned in ... and are not likely to be redeemed. (With DM notes that is a little different: 170 million notes are "missing", about 4 percent of the total volume.) Well, there is no deadline, you can always get your DM cash, coins or notes, exchanged. So why bother? Whatever "sits" in albums, vaults or mattresses, here or (especially with paper money) in other countries, will not become worthless. Agreed, such relatively modern coins are not exactly sought after. And yet they (actually mostly euro coins) happen to be what I focus on ... I just had a brief look at MA-Shops, and some sellers there have the 1 DM 1954: http://ma-shops.com/shops/maCategory.php5?catid=134&catName=J. 385 - 1 Mark&lang=en&sortby=jahr_norm&curr=USDEUR&save=1 These are all years; you can narrow the search down by entering a date in the "Search in ..." field. All the best for 2014 -- I am now "gone". Christian
