I only have one major hobby now that I devote much of my free time to. It's not one that I like to talk about but I will do so here because of my account's limited reach. All of you should know by now that I collect coins. I have invested money in a telescope and its paraphernalia but have devoted little time to Astronomy.
Coin Collecting is not something one should brag about because it makes you a target for robbery and while that comes across as paranoid, one should bear in mind that coin collecting is basically the assembly of spendable coin and currency which have known and accepted values unlike heirlooms making them easy to fence. That's why I ask you not to go about casually mentioning that I even have a collection to begin with and why at work I play down what I'm doing to just state quarters and coins with my birth year.
I started collecting briefly when I was in the second and third grades. Money is tight for seven-year-olds so once you've gone through your parents' jars of coins, you really get nothing after that. And even though our money back in the 1980's was about as worthless as it is today, having folders devoted to dimes and quarters would still have been an expensive undertaking. I abandoned it for a long time afterwards but saved the folders. I remember Nan giving me old cents from Poppy's collection to help fill up my old 1909-1940 Whitman folder and Mom buying me a roll of wheat cents seeded with a 1909 VDB cent but that was basically all I would ever have.
I came back to collecting in 1999 when I got a job in a supermarket. It was there I would occasionally get a silver dime that I would take home. It was around then that Dad gave me his collection rather unceremoniously: He just plopped the bag on my desk. So with a loud thud, I was up and collecting again. The following year, I would start pulling older nickels from my till a different job and at Christmas 2000, Poppy gave me that collection of cents which he had assembled for my Uncle Tetris back when he was a child. I also started subscribing to a coin magazine and began buying stuff in earnest after that.
I've learned a lot over the past ten years. I've made several, costly mistakes. I've read a lot about the subject and am thus considerably more competent at it than I was when I was 21. I focus on American coins of the 20th century but will collect those series which bleed into the 19th. I started dabbling in paper money too; but since moving out, money has been very tight so I've been limited to adding to my collection based on what I find at work.
I learned several years ago that you can sometimes find silver half dollars in rolls because people so rarely spend them. I've been buying $200 worth of halves every month from my bank since 2003. It's been frustrating lately as I haven't gotten anything in almost a year-and-a-half but I did get almost $40 in silver halves back in 2005 which was really cool. When silver hit $20/tr.oz. back in March 2008, I sold a lot of my common-date junk silver at 10x face. You don't often get opportunities like that so it felt good to profit so handsomely on stuff I acquired at face value and that I bought when silver was $5/tr.oz.
I can answer your questions on this stuff if you have them.
(originally posted to That Other Journal on January 6, 2010)
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