Well, I just ordered what will be a companion piece to my Zimbabwe note set / the first coin in a related project – I haven’t decided yet.

The coin is a 1980 Zimbabwe 10 Cent piece, graded MS65 by NGC. The coin happens to be TOP POP. I say “happens to be” because it also happens to be the only one of its kind graded by NGC – hard NOT to be top pop at that point. Anyway… MS65 is a decent, Gem BU, grade.

I saw this coin come up months ago on eBay and seriously considered buying it, but I just couldn’t convince myself to go for it for about $35. I was trying hard to focus on building out the note set instead, and I just wasn’t convinced that it was worth that. So, I didn’t go for it.

I saw it again Wednesday and saw that the seller had brought it down to $23.45 + $2.95 shipping. That was more interesting to me, but – more interesting still – they had a “Best Offer” option still. I added it to my watch list. It had 18 days left on the clock. I figured I’d wait a while longer and, if it was still there at the end of the month, offer the seller $20 + shipping and see if they’d take it.

I woke up Thursday morning and the seller had sent me a private offer for it for $20 + shipping. I seriously considered just taking it at that point, feeling rather amused. But, if they’re making an offer like that, I have to assume at that point that they really just want it gone, and if they’re willing to take that, they may go lower. So, I offered $18 + shipping and they accepted it less than an hour later.

I had a problem with the idea of paying $35 for it, but I’m happy with $20.95.

I’ve been thinking for a while that it might be fun to expand the Zimbabwe set to include some of the coins. This will be a first step on that path. I’m not sure if I’m really willing / interested in pursuing that right now, but for $21 I’ll make an impulse buy and lay a foundation.

All that said, I can’t help but laugh about it being TOP POP – for now. I always see merchants trying to hype up when a coin is the highest of the only one graded, trying to make the things sound rare, when really they just usually don’t get graded, while the seller is asking a silly-high price for it.

Sometimes TOP POP means a lot less than you might think.

I had a similar situation go down a while ago with a P-1c note for this set. The seller had been asking $40 for it after shipping for months and it hadn’t sold. They sent me an offer to come down to about $32-35. I offered them $29.50 for it, shipped, and they took it.

The prices on the Zimbabwe notes have come down considerably in the last 5 years and I don’t necessarily expect them to recover any time soon. A big part of building this set / collection has involved waiting until I could get the pieces for prices that were low enough that I don’t have to feel too bad if I can’t sell them for much or if I lose most / all of the money I put into the set when and if I ever sell.

I’ve been working hard to build up this set this year in part because I don’t see the prices going much lower from here – I’ve been getting plenty of these notes, already graded, for $8 - 15. I could always be wrong – they can always go lower if it isn’t $0.00, but at least at these prices I feel like I don’t have to care and it can be a spending of “fun money” and wasteful spending on a hobby without regard for future value.

I'd had a completely empty "place holder" set on my registry, just to let me look at what the competitive category for these looked like, and I've deleted that. I'll make it / re-make it when this coin arrives and try to build it into something more than an empty place holder. Now that this set / project is going to have coins and notes in it, I unfortunately don't know that I'll be able to show all of it in one place - it's going to have to be split between both sides of CCG's house, unless I can get some extra certification numbers for notes and use those "dummy" certs to show the coins with the notes in the notes signature set. I guess we'll see there.