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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;KBBPLL, post: 25924169, member: 104064&quot;]Reflections... I&#039;ve had three phases of collecting. 1. Young newbie (1971-1976), kid&#039;s income, raw (no TPGs existed), trustable coin shops. 2. (Long hiatus for phase 1.5.) Older (circa 2004), disposable income, stupid, mostly raw but also hodgepodge slabs. 3. A lot older, more disposable income, smarter, ANACS NGC and (cough) PCGS slabs but still some raw ones. </p><p><br /></p><p>Phase 1. Obviously there were no TPGs. Poor, Fair, Good, VG, Fine, Extra Fine, AU and BU was all you saw. Only shopped at a couple places in downtown Chicago, very old businesses where reputation was everything, what they wrote on the cardboard you could trust anyone would agree with. Sure, there was probably a lot of dipping, but the coins labeled BU weren&#039;t brightened up lower grades. Spending $5 in a coin shop was a huge deal. I had to mow an acre to earn that much, and we&#039;re not talking about riding mower or even self-propelled. I never felt that I was ripped off. The glory days. </p><p><br /></p><p>Phase 1.5...</p><p><br /></p><p>Phase 2. Circa 2004, enter the ebay era and I&#039;m past phase 1.5, where I loved the coins I&#039;d gotten from grandpa and purchased as a teen, but money went to essentials and fun, and for almost 30 years I didn&#039;t buy a single coin. During phase 2, I decided to start buying coins again and my goal was to expand grandpa&#039;s more valuable coins and get all the Canadian George VI silver across years and denominations. All from ebay. My stupid phase. I still believed everyone existed in phase 1. I bought quite a few raw coins from ebay with fluffy descriptions that showed up scratched cleaned and 6 grades lower than advertised. As well as even purchasing an NNC-slabbed coin (puke emoji). Disenchanted. </p><p><br /></p><p>Phase 3. Circa 2006-present. I learned how to grade myself. I learned that coin collecting after the phase 1 years became an &quot;investment&quot; to everybody, that everyone can &quot;get rich quick from pocket change&quot;, and that everyone is a scammer. I still buy raw coins but am much smarter about it (or so I think), but it&#039;s almost entirely ANACS, NGC, and (cough) PCGS because that&#039;s what the auction sites I trust restrict themselves to. And those TPGs exist because of phase 2. I learned how to research and find undocumented stuff in places where people haven&#039;t looked because they can&#039;t <i>make more money</i> there (cough cough Barbers cough cough), and bought the coins that had the stuff I found. Then I endlessly promoted them on coin forums (cough) so that maybe my kids who will get my coins can <i>make more money</i>. </p><p><br /></p><p>Phase 4. This is where the marketing budgets have taken over, and not only does it have to be in a certain slab because we&#039;re infallible and if it&#039;s in our slab, you can <i>make more money</i>, but it also has to have a sticker because no they&#039;re not infallible so with our sticker you can <i>make more money</i>, and on and on. I can&#039;t wait to see how phase 4 turns out. </p><p><br /></p><p>PS - bah humbug.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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