When I shipped my box of 10G coins (and a few others) last week I was pretty happy/ content to fork over an extra $26 for Registered mail. The box in question was worth about $5,000-6,000 dollars and contained 12 years of a collecting journey. I would have a hard time finding another 1880, 1887 and 1888 in Gem or near gem grades. I do not want to lose those.

However, I'm hoping to queue up 2 more submissions soon - one to NGC and one to PMG, both related to my Zimbabwe collection, that are going to have a total value of $20-50 each. It's hard to justify paying an extra $26 to protect against the loss of things that are so casually replaceable. Increasingly find that I don't even really consider insurance much once the cost of the insurance starts to exceed about 10% of the cost of the item - including and especially these service / warranty plans that Amazon keeps trying to sell me on electronics.

Anyway, it's just a funny thing to think about - for me anyway.

I'm hoping to belt out these next couple of submissions within the next couple of months - I'm hoping I don't let it drag into another 8 month ordeal of trying to convince myself to deal with it. With the 10Gs just the idea of how best to package and pad them was a very big deal for me, but I can tell already I'm just going to be a lot less worried about a Z-coin submission on a bunch of levels. But I guess that makes sense when the value and effort involved is 0.5-1.0% that of the first box. With the last box I ended up stealing some of my wife's more sad-looking hair-ties because I couldn't find rubber bands. Well... "stealing..." I did ask her if it was okay first... For the first one anyway.  

The big things that are going to hold these up for now is that I need to order the coins from a domestic dealer that actually has and sells them - it has been surprisingly hard to find US-based sellers for the Zimbabwe coin sets - and included in that coin order will be a couple more notes I need for filling holes. I don't think I want to make my notes / traveller check submission and then have to submit these other notes (like a P-40 and P-45) separately. I'd like to just knock them all out together. 

Side note but tracking says the box with the 10G coins was delivered today. It got to Sarasota on Monday. For all the noise that gets made about Registered Mail slowing things down a lot - and with even USPS saying it can slow shipping by 6-10 days - that got to Florida pretty quickly - even with the supposed high package volume that is supposedly slowing USPS down.

The box also contains a 1975 Bahama's gold coin - the only raw gold coin that I own - that I decided to get graded because... why not? And a couple of old raw civil war tokens. I wanted to add those to the 4 graded ones I have and maybe one of these days I'll get back into collecting those more seriously again. The ones I have are some of my favorite diversions in my collection / collecting. I really enjoy this history of them. but then, I really enjoy the history of a lot of coins, including my growing set of "golden nickels."