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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;kaparthy, post: 641358, member: 57463&quot;]Impulse buying of problems is what keeps most collectors too poor to go to an ANA Convention or a regional or state show and buy real items with real value. </p><p><br /></p><p>A coin with extremely fine details net graded to very fine because of problems is not an extremely fine coin.&nbsp; It may not even be very fine.&nbsp; It is a problem coin, no matter what the price.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>Some collectors expect a kind of transcendental gestalt -- the whole is greater than the sum of its parts -- to give superior value to an inferior inventory.&nbsp; A thousand problems do not make an admirable collection.&nbsp; If they make you happy, that is fine.&nbsp; Satisfying yourself is the core of collecting.&nbsp; However, do not imagine that you or your heirs will sell these later for a great profit, unless, of course, you find someone else with your desire for other people&#039;s problems.</p><p><br /></p><p>I keep a special savings account for conventions.&nbsp; It starts with an empty quart jar in my closet into which I toss my cents at the end of the day.&nbsp; I have another container just for dimes.&nbsp; (Nickels are special and are set aside for a different purpose entirely.&nbsp; Quarters I spend for parking meters, buses and gum.)&nbsp; When the containers are full, they go into the savings account.&nbsp; It is a barebones pass book with no ATM card.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>When we lived in Albuquerque, I planned to go to the ANA in Phoenix, but we moved to Traverse City, so I looked forward to Milwaukee... and that did not happen either.&nbsp; We thought we were moving to Portland, but we did not.&nbsp; And I will not be in Los Angeles.&nbsp; Life goes on.&nbsp; I do not have to buy something to be happy and there is nothing so unique or rare that it will not be at market later.&nbsp; Meanwhile, I have a passbook earning pitiful interest but still not being spent, either.&nbsp; When I do make a show, I will have the freeedom to pick and choose according to my tastes -- and the discipline not to buy at all.</p><p><br /></p><p>I highly recommend <a href="http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/bdorsey1/41docs/52-fra.html" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/bdorsey1/41docs/52-fra.html" rel="nofollow">Benjamin Franklin&#039;s &quot;The Way to Wealth.&quot;</a>&nbsp; Our publicly-financed schools face serious competition only from another group of altruists.&nbsp; Max Weber quoted long passages from Franklin in his book <i>The Protestant Ethic and the Rise of Capitalism</i>.&nbsp; The capitalist ethic of Adam Smith and Benjamin Frankin has been lost.&nbsp; John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie would not recognize the products of our MBA programs: looting the company and taking a golden parachute is the communist idea of capitalism. </p><p><br /></p><p>&nbsp;That translates to our hobby when those of us who buy and sell money for fun fall into anti-capitalist thinking because we have huge blind spots in our knowledge base.&nbsp; We don&#039;t know any better because we spent our childhoods in schools where we sat down, shut up and did as we were told.&nbsp; Ideally, we would have been standing behind a counter waiting on customers. Or working in a factory cleaning tools.</p><p><br /></p><p>eBay is problematic at best.&nbsp; I understand that truly reputable dealers actually have sales presence there.&nbsp; However, from the fact that naming hides rather than identifies, to the many ways to tilt and skew feedback ratings, and considering all the problems in between, eBay is a barrier, not a venue.&nbsp; An auction is many buyers competing for an item.&nbsp; Conversely on the bourse floor, you have many dealers competing for your money.&nbsp; A coin show is a better bourse.</p><p><br /></p><p>Numismatic conventions do indeed have auctions.&nbsp; At these events, you will find many dealers, few collectors. It is very controlled by its nature.&nbsp; I have seen dealers apparently with motivated customers behind them try to run each other to the wall with bidding going far beyond expectations, but such exceptions are the stuff we talk about years later.</p><p>&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>Finally, the hobby is about the stuff, the coins, the banknotes, and all that.&nbsp; Mostly, I write.&nbsp; As you can tell, I am not much of a collector.&nbsp; However, in order to write, I do need to see and touch the material, to come to know it first hand.&nbsp; I will have an article in <i>The Celator</i> about the fairs of medieval Champagne.&nbsp; For that, I bought the deniers of the time and place.&nbsp; But from my point of view, that is tangential.&nbsp; And I started the project about 18 months before I wrote the article, buying not just the coins, but the books and articles that give them true, historical value.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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