Think I am gonna go and collect NGC * coins now.

Oh I don't disagree with that, especially since you can often buy the same coin for less money on Heritage.

But on Heritage you don't have the problem with non-paying buyers that you do on ebay.

 

It's a different mentality, a different way of thinking. Coins for my personal collection were always purchased because I liked the coin, not because I wanted to or ever expected to make money from the coin. I was a coin collector, not a coin investor. I bought coins because I loved the hobby. I loved the coins for what they were, not for what they were worth.

That said, of course there were a great many times that I bought a specific coin with the intent of selling it so that I could use that profit to buy another coin for my collection. That was easy. But it was only easy because of my knowledge, because I was able to cherrypick specific coins that I knew I could immediately sell for more than I paid for it.

And oddly enough, when the time came and I finally realized what it was I had actually loved so much for my entire life, I sold my entire collection and quit collecting coins. That was over 6 years ago.

You see, it is the study of the coins, the accumulation of knowledge that I always really loved - not the coins. But I had to spend almost 50 years collecting coins and studying them to finally figure that out.

In the now over 50 years that I have studied coins it has been my experience that 9 out of 10, perhaps even more, people lose money on their coin collections when those collections are finally sold. Coins are a terrible investment, one of the worst. And coins should never, ever, be looked at or even thought of as an investment for that reason. Never spend a dime on coins unless you can afford to just throw that dime away.

That is the best advice I can ever give anyone.