Coin Collecting for Beginners
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There are a few ways you can get coins for your collection, you can buy them from a coin dealer, an auction on the internet, other sites on the internet, through the newspaper, television shopping shows or a friend.
Buying coins this way you will need to be knowledgeable, you need to understand coin grading, coin value and what third party grading (slabbed coins) is. One factor that affects all this is your desire to own that coin or series of coins.
Other ways you can get started is looking at your change, buying rolls of coins from banks and supermarkets at face value, use a metal detector on the beach, old trails and old foundations or parks. Back in the good old days banks were not as common as now and the depression era caused a lot of people to bury or hide their money near a land mark of some kind such as an old tree, in certain areas of a barn, loose bricks in a wall,etc.. Finding a coin this way makes it exciting to collect.
I still look at my loose change for coins that have errors on them caused in the making of that coin, some errors that are no longer available in loose change you may have heard of is the 1955 double die, the 1972 double die, and the 1995 double die. One of the more recent errors is the new Washington dollar coin. The U.S. Mint in it’s production of some of these failed to stamp the information on the edge of the coin such as the mint mark, e pluribus unum, in god we trust, making these varieties more like a metal instead of a coin. When these were first discovered they were selling at $200 each.
One other way you can buy coins is from the United States Mint. They produce coins and sets every year, some go up in value others do not, but you can be assured they are real an 99.9% the grade they advertise it to be. You can visit their website or call and ask for a brochure.
To give you an idea of the coins the U.S. Mint sells, in 1995 the Mint was selling a 10th anniversary gold coin set for about $1000. In that set was a silver eagle dollar. It was the only way to get that silver eagle dollar. The set, last I checked, was selling for almost $6000. There are still values out there! Approximately 30,000 sets were sold, that is a low mintage set. The lower the mintage usually the more it’s worth. Mintage means the number of coins the U.S. Mint made that year. For example the 2005D Lincoln penny had 3,764,450,000 pennies made from the Denver mint.
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