do any of you think we should be keeping the clad 60's and early 70's quarters? i see many of them in circulation. i saw one 1970 quarter at an antique shop a couple weeks ago selling for $1. it just looked like a normal one we get in change. the funny thing about it is i located the man who was selling the 1970 quarter for a buck and i bought a 1924S peace dollar and i got a 1970 in change from the same guy that was selling it for $1. what about dimes? dimes and quarters from the late 60's early 70's are starting to get some pretty good wear on them. i got a bunch of them and were wondering if i should spend them or not. does anybody here keep them? i don't know if they are collectable or not.
I keep all Roosevelt dimes from the 70's and 80's it is my opinion that these coins are very underrated. Try and keep the best examples of these years as you can. Same with the quarters best examples from the 60's and 70's .
COINLOVER, I just noticed you gave me my first 1,000 post P.M. me I have a gift for you thanks again.:hug:
i pretty much save all my change. I did it as a kid then cashed it all in about 15 ears ago. bt about 5 years back i started with a 5GL water bottle and just droped change in it every tme i came home from a day of coffee and lunch brakes. lol
Typical examples will be common for a very long time and you'll always be able to find ones as nice in a few decades probably. Superior examples get scarcer every day. They get lost and destroyed and most of those that don't get worn down. The best way to figure out which ones are tough is to just start saving the nicest one of each date. You'll quickly see that some duplicates are worth saving too.
Coin Lover: I think that saving the early clad coins is a good idea, but only in uncirculated. Remember that they produced billions of those coins at the time. However, really nice uncs are hard to find, but plain uncs are plentiful.
i got a proof 1965 quarter in change a couple months back. its like someone cut it out of a proof set. :kewl: :kewl:
You're right, of course, but one shouldn't lose sight of the fact that they are common in MS-60 only in comparison to the demand. Most of the Morgans are more common in unc than something like a 1969 quarter or a 1971 dime. There are fewer than 80,000 1983-P quarters in true unc and if this were a Lincoln or a Morgan it would sell for far more. While the coins were made in the billions, they've also been used up, worn out, and destroyed in the billions. There are several reasons the clads are tough in nice unc. Perhaps the primary reason is that there composition is extremely hard so they don't readily accept a strike. This hardness also wears the dies very quickly assuring later strikes will be made with worn dies. This means that really nice attractive clads are not only tough in uncirculated condition but are far tougher, far rarer, in circulation. There is virtually no chance anymore of finding a nice attractive XF 1969 quarter. Even in a nice solid VF this coin is very tough. With other scarcities like a 1916-D dime one might always have purchased one from a dealer if he couldn't find it in circulation. If you wanted an XF and all you could find was a beat up VG then you could just buy an XF and use the sale of the beat up coin to offset the cost. But you can't do this with a 1969 quarter because dealers don't stock them and collectors don't have them. Oh, don't get me wrong, it's not like these are legitimate rarities in XF and AU but even if the price went up a hundred fold it would bring more than perhaps a dozen or two nicely struck coins onto the market. People simply overestimate the depth of supply and the interest in these coins over the years. The coins aren't out there because no one cared about them. Whitman didn't even make a folder to hold clad quarters until 1984 or so. An album for them didn't exist until 2003! Almost every picture of a quarter seen in mass media was of a silver coin dated in the early '60's until well into the 1990's. Many of the uncs are very unattractive. With these it's not only the rotten strikes and worn dies but also a tendency for the coins to get banged up at the mint. Collectors didn't care about quality so the mint didn't either. Nobody even much glanced at the coins so quality in all its aspects was poor. With some dates like the '72-D quarter it's not tough to find a nice unc that isn't banged up but try finding a 1971. These are simply tough and like the '69 won't be found above nice F in circulation. So yes. Save the high grades and nice coins. Don't bother with the ordinary because they'll be available for a long long time. When you look at a coin ask yourself will this be tough in forty years. If the answer is no than keep looking. You'll save too many at first but that's OK since you can go back later and cull out the dogs. Do assemble a set since it is the easiest way to see which dates are really tough. For the main part the clads difficulty to find is determined mostly by age and mintage but there are some anomalies caused by striking characteristics, annealing, and rim depth. There are also some dates that usually had ugly surfaces or were struck by excessively worn dies. A set will show you these things at a glance and provide a handy reference for the little design variations over the years.
