Well, I talked about in posts as early as January that I wanted to go for a 1924 Double Eagle this year and last week I finally made it happen:

For a bit of context on this, I’d gotten enough cash together to make this happen as of around May or June, but everything I found was either too expensive, had ugly copper spots, bad strikes, really unattractive marks, or they sold before I saw them on Facebook. This got a little discouraging as the price of gold meanwhile went from around $2300-2400/oz to around $2,600 per ounce and I kinda just soft dropped / abandoned the pursuit and switched to hoarding cash and painting minis – which, while it can cost money, is a comparatively much cheaper hobby than coin collecting.

Earlier in the month my wife went on a cruise with her mother and abandoned me with the kids alone for 5 days and I’d been joking that I claimed the prerogative to buy a gold coin using house funds and not my hobby money as payment for having to do the actual childcare. This also happened right after the election, when the price of Gold subsequently dropped about $250/oz from the recent $2800 peak, and, all joking aside, it seemed like it might actually be a good time to buy something.

So that got me looking at my world gold collection to remember what I had and what I still wanted, which got me shopping on eBay and on certain dealer websites to see if something looked good for the money. I was doing some of this while working from home and avoiding dealing with a client that I’m really not friends with at the moment.

I had been narrowing in on the idea of going for a $5 Liberty, maybe just going for a random date deal like I’d talked about a week or so ago.

As I was shopping for that, looking at offerings from a dealer I’ve bought from several times before, I saw that they’d listed two MS65+ 1924 Double Eagles, graded by NGC – Ebay showed it to me in one of those “Similar” / “Related” items areas, and it got my attention.

There were two. I looked at both. One of them showed a small, odd, black spot in the middle of the obverse that I didn’t really like. The other one looked really nice.

The price was a little higher than what I’d originally wanted to pay – I’d originally been hoping to get away for under $3K, but, even with the pullback, the price of gold was up $200/oz from when I’d been thinking that, they were still asking less for this than a lot of other dealers were wanting for similar coins (many sellers lately are listing MS65s for $3,400-3,600), and I knew from past experience that this seller usually lists things for prices that are pretty fair and consistent with the market. So I was willing to maybe let that go.

In the past, the more I’d looked at these coins the less I liked them. The more I looked at this one the more I liked it. Shandy later commented on the fact I was smiling when I showed it to her. I really liked this one, and, while I hemmed-and-hawed on the price a bit, I realized that it was going to annoy me if someone else snapped it up while I was debating and I missed out on it. So that was my answer, and I just bought it.

So I finally pulled this one off – A double eagle for my grandmother’s birthyear, bought in the calendar year when she would have turned 100, purchased a little over 7 years after she passed.

I got it in the mail yesterday, exactly 1 week after I ordered it.

Mass produced eBay dealer photos are always a little fun, but I worry less when it's from a dealer I've bought from before that advertises free returns. Even paying return shipping isn't that terrible if you aren't happy with a purchase this big.

That said, I'm very happy with this one. It has good luster. It's very clean for a 100-year-old coin, but it has this fine, thin layer of "stuff" over it that you'd expect to see on something that has been around for that long without being cleaned, polished or otherwise rubbed down. It has solid detailing on the face, the knee and the toes / ankle.  The reverse with the Eagle looks great but you can see a couple of places where it took a hit and you have some dings that cross some of the rays, probably from another coin hitting it in a bag. The photos above show some orange near the bottom of the obverse that I don't see when I look at the coin - I think that's an artifact of my lighting and lighting adjustments in editing and not a copper spot.

Feel free to let me know how you think I did vs the dealer's images.  

Still have not bought the other coin or anything else. This completely turned my head and distracted me from that.  I'm sure Shandy isn't complaining since this did come 100% from my hobby budget, but I haven't forgotten the other either!