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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;ewomack, post: 3345233, member: 15588&quot;]There is very little money to be made in coins, especially for the general public. I haven&#039;t sold too many coins, but I have almost always sold them at a loss. One of the biggest reasons is that while I was learning about the hobby I grossly overpaid for coins that ended up being cleaned or possibly altered upon further inspection. I know now that those dealers <i>had</i> to know that they were selling problem coins to me at insanely over the top prices. I was their perfect target: I knew nothing. At the time, I was very excited to buy the coins and I ran home and gazed at them in wonder and awe. Only years later did I look at them through a loupe and discover how badly I was taken. What I once enjoyed I now despise. Don&#039;t let this happen to you. In other words, don&#039;t let unscrupulous dealers sell you garbage. There are plenty of them out there. Of course there are good dealers, too, but until I actually learned something about coins I could not tell a shady dealer from a decent one. Now I can almost always detect them from across the room. I&#039;ve had more than one dealer lie to me about years and types of Japanese coins, likely because they were confident that I didn&#039;t know how to read Japanese. One dealer handed me a Japanese coin that wasn&#039;t even a Japanese coin, but claimed confidently that it was.</p><p><br /></p><p>My point is that it&#039;s very easy to pay too much for valueless coins because parts of the hobby prey off of people that don&#039;t know what they&#039;re doing. I was one of them. This caused me to take a very long break from the hobby and I&#039;m surprised that I ever returned. I think this practice has as much a chance of ruining the hobby than any other often cited possible causes. The only way to make money in this hobby is either through extreme luck or by finding people willing to buy coins for more than what you paid for them. Not to mention that collectibles have a nasty habit of fluctuating horribly in value over the years. The value of coins depends only on the existence of people willing to pay for them. Nothing else. If such people go away, so does the value.</p><p><br /></p><p>Everyone says not to buy coins for value and to buy them for enjoyment, but I&#039;m having a harder and harder time enjoying things that I&#039;ll ultimately lose money on, despite how much I like the objects themselves. I&#039;ve started selling some coins and the old reality is hitting hard: I can&#039;t sell them for what I thought I could sell them for, with very few exceptions, even on Ebay (and Ebay&#039;s fees make it an even larger losing proposition). In the end, the secret to making money off of coins is simple: <i>don&#039;t buy coins.</i>[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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