Buying coins when the money isn?t there.

I hope everyone had a great 4th of July weekend. Around here the 4th of July means getting everything ready for our big BBQ bash. While my wife is making the potato and macaroni salads and doing the perquisite pie backing, I?m out cutting the grass and cleaning up the yard, making sure the pool is up to snuff and making sure there is an ample supply of charcoal for the grill and smokers. Fortunately, it also means everyone sleeps late in the mornings so I have time to check out EBay as the other auction sites rarely have anything going on that weekend. This year was now different. Typically pickings are thin because everyone is off on vacation but every once in awhile you can come across some sweet deals. This year I hit the jackpot. I ended up picking up five nice coins at some very sweet rock bottom prices and by rock bottom I mean my total winning bids added up to right around $80.

So this 4th of July weekend I added a 1981D MS66RD Lincoln Cent, a 2010D MS66RD Lincoln Cent, a 1964 PF68 RD Lincoln Cent, a 2007S PF70UC Clad Utah State Quarter and a 1999 PF70UC Silver Connecticut State Quarter. You don?t see 1999 PF70UC Silver Quarters on EBay very often so I was quite surprised to see someone had listed all five 1999 silver quarters. I put a low ball bid on all of them except the Pennsylvania Quarter (I already have one in my set). I watched as one by one my bids got swallowed up by higher bids. The Delaware Quarter went for more than 3 times my bid and ended up in the $2200 range. (Hey, I can dream!) Georgia and New Jersey ended up going for not quite twice my bid. Honestly, I really didn?t expect to get any of them. Let?s face it; these are the key quarters in the set and pricey to say the least. I pulled up the EBay page for the Connecticut Quarter and watched as the minutes and seconds ticked off to the end of the auction. It seemed to take forever. It was like watching the last 2 minutes of a close football game. The clock ran out and damn didn?t I end up with the winning bid and it didn?t even reach my maximum bid. My Proof State Quarter set now has one more key coin in it. Even better was that EBay had just issued its EBucks and I had the proceeds from a few coins I sold earlier in the week sitting in my PayPal account so paying for the five coins didn?t hit the summer budget at all.

You might think that would be the highlight of my coin collecting for the weekend. It wasn?t! During the party on the 4th, I was telling my neighbor about my coin collecting and showing him some of my large copper cents. Early American Coppers look so different from anything that most people have seen they make for a great conversation on coins and early American history, appropriate for the holiday. Anyway, my neighbor tells me that his grandfather left him and his brother some coins and that he?d love to know what they are because he is not really into collecting coins. A little while later he comes back from his house with two coins in hard plastic holders. One is a three-cent nickel which is pretty cool in its own right but the other is an old copper coin. I perked right up to look at that one. My neighbor tells me he?s not sure what it is but he thinks it?s British. I looked at it and my eyes nearly popped out! I said, ?You realize this is a counterfeit coin?? I could see his heart sink. I had to tell him that was a good thing because as it turns out it is a 1787 Machin?s Mill GEORGIVS Half-Penny (type III) in incredibly good shape, probably VF or XF. I explained to him that England did not mint any half-penny coins in 1787 and this is actually an early American Coin minted in New England or New York. This is a very cool coin and I am so glad that he showed it to me. I don?t think my neighbor will become a coin collector but he has a new appreciation for the coin and his grandfather.

Anyway, I?m still playing with the pictures in my registry sets. It was a slow week because of the holiday but I will end this entry with a picture of my newly acquire 1999 Silver Connecticut Quarter. (Which for the record has NOT been relased by the previous owner yet! Grrrr!)

Dennis