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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;beef1020, post: 2500159, member: 24544&quot;]Depends entirely on what you plan to collect, how much you are going to spend, what your collecting goals are, and probably more important what your personal preference is.&nbsp; There is no single answer.</p><p><br /></p><p>I can tell you, my personal preference is to have coins raw.&nbsp; I do not like slabs and try my best to avoid buying coins in slabs, and crack any coin I purchase out of them.&nbsp; I store my coin in paper envelopes because I like to take them out and hold them.&nbsp; This personal preference largely steered me into my main collecting interests, U.S. large cents previously, and now ancients, because in those two collecting areas raw coins are still the norm.&nbsp; I have seem $10,000+ large cents stored in paper envelopes, and have heard stories of collectors carrying $1,000,000 large cents in their pocket and handing them over to other collectors to inspect, same goes with ancients.&nbsp; I liked this ethic and wanted to faternize with other like minded collectors. </p><p><br /></p><p>In my opionion, for too many people slabs have become the product that they collect, not the coin inside the slab.&nbsp; On the high end of the market you see people paying large sums of money for a coin with 1 grade difference from PCGS when the coins are basically equivalent, or worse the ‘lower’ graded coin is nicer.&nbsp; All for the prestigage of having their collection higher up in the registry set scoreboard.&nbsp; For me, collecting is personal.&nbsp; I do not care what someone else thinks of the coin, I make the grading/value decision based on what I like.&nbsp; Now, that’s not to say I ignore the advice of more experienced collectors because I value it tremendously and I am always open to advice about coins.&nbsp; But at the end of the day, I am not purchasing a coin because PCGS said it was a specific grade, or because my collecting goals are to compete with other collectors for what PCGS has said is the ‘best’ collection.&nbsp; I purchase coins because I like to collect for my pleasure, and I evaluate coins based on my personal taste, which is of course informed by other collectors and the current ideas surrounding surface quality and preservation.</p><p><br /></p><p>On slabs or not, you have to factor into the purchase of a coin the amount of money that is represented by the coin and the slabbing costs.&nbsp; If you’re buying a $10 2009 cent I would argue that $9.99 of that is the cost of slabbing because you can still go to the bank and find BU examples in rolls.&nbsp; If you are buying key date cents like an S-vdb it may be worthile for you to spend the extra money and get a slabbed example at $950 instead of the raw one at $900 if you are not comfortable grading/authenticating coins yourself. Although again slabbed coins can be wildly misgraded and fake slabs are on the market, so I would encourage you to not spend a lot of money on these types of coins until you can grade/authenticate for yourself.</p><p><br /></p><p>Last point on resale value/ease.&nbsp; There is a lot that goes into this, and it’s not just slab versus no slab.&nbsp; The only real way to get a handle on what coins are easy to sell, and if slabs make a difference is to periodically sell some coins, which I advise collectors to do.&nbsp; It’s a great learning experience and really teaches you how to buy coins.&nbsp; It’s all to easy to book paper profits on coins only to realize that there is no market, you paid too much for the coin, or you had not considered just how large the bid/ask spread really is; this applies even more so for common material.</p><p><br /></p><p>If I was your age and had your budget, I would be buying rolls of coins from the bank and filling up albums/searching for silver.&nbsp; Very little money involved for a lot of time spent/fun.&nbsp; Alternatively, try putting together a nice set of walking liberty half dollars in a grade where you are basically getting the coins for melt value, or maybe a small premium above, and skip the key dates until you have more experience/disposable income.&nbsp; Alternatively you could look into a type set of U.S. silver, or maybe 20th centery silver, again looking to pick up coins at basically 1x to 2x melt value.&nbsp; There are a ton of options here, but I would encourage you to explore what you like and discourage you from purchasing a slabbed 2009 cent because you really want ‘a slabbed coin’.&nbsp; That strikes me as buying the marketing, not collecting the coin.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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