Now you know what they mean by 'join the club'.

When I first started on my epic journey of coin collecting, I thought all you had to do was invest a few hard-earned dollars and buy a nice looking coin in a slab, or if raw, send it into a grading company and wait for your 'prize' to be returned. It seems to me, after reading numerous journal entries, that all of us have experienced the same excitement (of buying a great looking coin), the same exhiliration (of submitting said coin for grading or cross-grading), and the same anticipation and anxiousness (waiting for our gem to be returned) and, sadly the reality that our judgement of value was not as accurate as we would have liked.

In retrospect, this is one of the nuances of coin collecting that keeps me coming back for more. Don't allow yourself to get discouraged, although it's easy to do, but instead learn from the experience and move on knowing that it was a lesson learned. Just be thankful it was nothing more than money lost. I'm quite certain all of us have wasted money more than once on far more trivial pursuits than such a great and personally rewarding hobby. We have all been there, some of us more often than we like to admit, but I would not trade the opportunity to gather such fine, historic works of art "for all the tea in China". May your good experiences in this endeavor far exceed the bad.