Read an interesting article by Conly Rieder in Dec 2018 Numistmatist. He had a package of coins lost in the mail by USPS. They were insured for $12K because that's what they cost him. He filed a claim for $12K using his receipts as the basis for the value of the claim. Problem is USPS only considered costs of the coins themselves. Shipping, handling, insurance and buyer's premiums weren't considered. So, he got a check for about $9.5 K. He appealed, citing values in price guides, to no avail. Too late. Done deal. According to him, a letter from a dealer or citations from recognized price guides (i.e. fair market value) would have been acceptable to USPS if used initially. Rare Coin Market Report valued his coins at $15+K, so if he had used that value, he would have gotten the full $12K. Mr. Rieder's parting point was that he should have used the highest acceptable value for his coins at the outset in his claim. This is a good point. However, I think one should use the highest acceptable value when purchasing insurance in the first place. If Mr. Rieder had done this, he probably would have gotten $15+K instead of $9.5K. If you are insuring coins, the highest value is likely to be from a recognized price guide, not from your receipts. However, the receipts are still important. If the coins are lost, there may be a reportable capital gain or loss depending on the difference in the insurance payout and your receipts. Check with your tax advisor. Cal
Ship them all to Italy, Russia or Israel, declare the full value, and you don’t need to hope for anything bad to happen... you can be pretty sure some of them will “get lost” in transit.
I don't know if can insure through the postal service for international shipments. And for Registered mail, the safest way to ship domestically, the MAXIMUM reimbursement drops to $50 once it leaves the country no matter what the declared value and fees were.
I had a similar issue with one claim, years ago. They did not accept the (Krause) priceguide data I provided. I ended up eating the whole thing and taking a total loss. This was only on $170 worth of coins (and an accompanying money order), but at the time, that was a really big sum for me, and a very painful loss. I think if you insure a coin for a certain amount, you should receive exactly that amount in the event of a proven claim. For the USPS to lose one's coin and then quibble over the value of it adds insult to injury. Now, I know they have to be vigilant against insurance fraud and all that, but if a shipment is indeed lost, then they should pay up- for the full coverage amount the customer paid for! Or deny the claim altogether, if there isn't enough evidence. I do not understand the half-measures and partial refund thing. I'm sorry, Dear Uncle Sam, but first I have I pay you and your employees somewhat exorbitant fees not to steal my coins... then when somebody does, you give me the runaround and refuse to honor the "protection money" I paid you for, thereby robbing me twice? It boils my britches. It's still a bitter memory 25 years later. Around the same time that happened, it was in the news that some full mailbags had been found in a river near the post office where I had shipped those coins from. Seems somebody wanted to make a shortcut on their route and didn't feel like delivering all that stuff. My outgoing coins were not in those bags- there was record of them reaching their destination in the Pacific NW. I think they were stolen by an unauthorized person who signed for them, or maybe my trading partner lied about receiving them. So maybe I was out of luck anyway. Maybe I naively overlooked something. I finally just gave up in disgust. Doubly annoying was the fact that there was a US Postal money order in the package with the coins (I was "trading up", you see), and though I had the receipt for that, I did not get a refund for it, either. Robbed again.
