Numismatics

Collectible coins. a piece of silver that is worth $1 as currency, $15 as silver (called melt value) or $350,000 to a collector if it is the proper amount of original shiny unworn and rare as determined by experts. Turned out to be a huge waste of time and money buying collectible coins without knowing in advance that experts can clean common lower grade coins ($35 VALUE) and put them in holders with phony high grades printed on the labels. Left me thinking I was going to strike a big payday buying out someones estate at auction but really just buying out a coin dealers spiffed up junk bin. Luckily they were returnable. Very much like baseball cards, if you don't know the business inside out don't bother with getting into it. Lots of crooks, scheisters and cons from what I could tell.

Which is why I only buy for "melt value". Anything that may happen beyond that is just a bonus!

which is what I will be going back to doing for diversity.

John Master wrote:Turned out to be a huge waste of time and money buying collectible coins without knowing in advance that experts can clean common lower grade coins ($35 VALUE) and put them in holders with phony high grades printed on the labels.

My general opinion it that buying anything considered to be "collectible" is usually going to be a suckers bet whether it be collectible comic books, baseball cards, coins, or *gulp* beanie babies.

A better plan is to guess at what is not collectible now, but might become so in the future. If you want a good start, figure out what the 20 year olds of today were playing with (actually playing with, not collecting) when they were 5-10 years old. In about 5 years those items will probably start to be "collectible" as the then yuppie 25 year olds have a bunch of money to blow on things that remind them of happy times in their childhood.

From my experience, "collectables" are only valuable when the economy is good.
Once the economy tanks, so does the value of those items.
When money is tight, there is little market for collectibles.

The lesson I learned from this ordeal is that there are only 3 respected "grading companies" that the people who pay loads of money for a collectible coin will trust when it comes to authenticity and grade (its a scale of 1-70, with 70 being almost unobtainably perfect). The coins I was buying were either graded by a defunct company that nobody who pays any amount of money for a coin would trust, or just labeled as such in a way that anyone with a home computer and a label printer and some plastic coin holders could do easily. Here is an example of what would be an $80,000-$100,000 coin if it were actually an "MS66" as graded by one of the three respected companies. If sent in you would pay $60 for them to grade it and send it back as a 58 which is actually worth about $35. tops. http://www.ebay.com/itm/1879-O-MORGAN-SILVER-DOLLAR-RARE-COLLECTOR-DATE-RAW-US-MINT-COIN-/141849097815?hash=item2106dd7657:g:vx0AAOSwAKxWaLjs#ht_2038wt_1074

my plan was to get in and get out as quickly as possible and use the proceeds to buy land which is ludicrously expensive where I want to live and it's hard to come by a parcel that hasn't been monoculture farmed. That plan went south as they say!