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Richard Blaine

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Journal Entries posted by Richard Blaine

  1. Richard Blaine
    Ignorance is not bliss!
    I`m a retired civil servant. I am not wealthy by any stretch of the imagination. I conservatively invested in the stock market most of my adult life. My overall experience was mixed, but I did alright. I made a reasonable amount of profit over the years. Considerably more than I would have achieved from simple interest earning investments. I`ve been retired for 10 years now.
    In 2009, and quite by accident, I pushed a wrong button on my TV`s remote control. Serendipity. I was looking at a television coin show. The TV show was called The Coin Vault. Prior to this, I thought that you could only buy a coin by visiting a local coin shop. *Before I write more, I`m going to see if can input this into my Journal. I expect that I will fail, and I will lose what I have written so far. We`ll see.
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  2. Richard Blaine
    Ignorance is not bliss!
    I`m a retired civil servant. I am not wealthy by any stretch of the imagination. I conservatively invested in the stock market most of my adult life. My overall experience was mixed, but I did alright. I made a reasonable amount of profit over the years. Considerably more than I would have achieved from simple interest earning investments. I`ve been retired for 10 years now.
    In 2009, and quite by accident, I pushed a wrong button on my TV`s remote control. Serendipity. I was looking at a television coin show. The TV show was called The Coin Vault. Prior to this, I thought that you could only buy a coin by visiting a local coin shop. *Before I write more, I`m going to see if can input this into my Journal. I expect that I will fail, and I will lose what I have written so far. We`ll see.
    Pleasant surprize. I was able to save it. I had never really enjoyed visits to coin stores because invariably I would be the only customer in the store. I would feel self conscious, as the operator would hover near me. I just didn`t like the atmosphere I guess. Over the years I had bought a few small, old gold coins for my yourgest daughter`s birthdays now and then. That was the extent of my involvement.
    The stock market had melted down more times than I care to remember. I had put my investment money on the side lines in about 2002 or so. I dabbled here or there a little, but always almost got burnt. So I stopped even that. I was left with no way to invest or even keep up with inflation. My alternatives were real estate, antiques, art or coins. I knew nothing about art or antiques and had always sworn that I would never get involved in real estate investing. That left me with coins and collectables. I collected coins when I was young, up to the time when I got married and quickly figured out that I could no longer afford any hobby that involved spending money.
    The Statehood Quarters had gotten me back into the mood. I just collected them from pocket change. When I discovered the Coin Vault TV show, they were selling full sets of silver proof quarters. I inventoried mine to see if I had all of the States. I was shocked when I found only about half of the States in my collection. I decided right then and there that I would begin to educate myself in the hobby. I found more TV coin shows and watched them all. I subscribed to coin magazines, etc. Long story short, within six months I was investing in coins.
    I did so through 2010 and thought I was doing pretty good. Then I discovered Ebay. Man, that was depressing. Ebayers were selling coins every minute of every day for 20 to 30% less than I had routinely been paying. Needless to say, I stopped buying coins on TV. I still get a few that way because sometimes they do have great hard to find coins that aren`t totally over priced. I am now fully invested in collectable coins and I`m very happy I discovered Ebay, etc., when I did. This journal entry has been all about how I got back into collecting. I think coins are going into a boom time because baby-boomers are starting to retire. I`m on the older edge of being a boomers since I was born in 1945. Boomers collected when they were kids, they are probably the wealthiest segment of our society, they`re looking for safe investments and hedges against inflation and lastly after being retired for awhile, they`re going to get bored. They will find that their grand-kids will love to be taught the hobby. Simply put, everthing about coin collecting is good. My retired life is so much richer now and all of my grandkids have become little coiners.
    My next journal entry will speak to my love of American Silver/Gold Eagles and how my collection grew. Til next time. - Rick Blaine
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  3. Richard Blaine
    My Silver Eagle journey.
    I presently have my entire set up for sale on Ebay. It`s a 30 day BIN, Best Offer sale. When it is over, if the set is still mine, I will make another journal entry regarding how the set came to be. Mostly, it will be about all the things I learned from my many mistakes. It seems that is the only way I can really learn anything!
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  4. Richard Blaine
    How I became a nut job.
    Since I intended to use coin collecting as an investment vehicle, I did a lot of thinking about what to collect. I knew relatively little about collecting, but I intended to learn quickly by cramming. I watched every TV coin related shows. I read books by Rick Tomaska and several others. I signed up for news letters about coins. I also studied paper money collecting. I`m a retired law enforcement evidence tech. expert. I could testify as an expert witness in court. Particularly about fingerprints, etc. While studying this stuff, I kept casting about for something I could really get into and actually be able to complete. I decided that I wanted to have a collection that was world class. That could only be matched, never beaten. I settled on American Silver Eagles.
    At first, I collected 70 grade business strikes and proof strikes. I soon figured out that I couldn`t ever afford to complete a MS70 set, let alone both MS70 & PF70. So I focused on just proof issues. I thought that I would try to control myself and only collect the rarest issues and ignore all the common ones. It took me about six months to figure out that I was never going to find them, let alone buy them. I gave up for awhile. Unexpectedly, I found someone selling most of the hard to find Silver Eagles. I didn`t know what to do. Buy them, not buy them, buy them, not buy them, etc., etc. Fight or flight response! Flipping a mental coin, I bought them. Suddenly it looked like maybe a could make a world class set.
    In a few months, I had the full set of, at that time it was 23 coins. Now what do I do? Lots of people had full sets. Well, maybe not lots of people but certainly several people. What to do, what to do? Everything I thought of seemed to have already been done. Finally I came up with the idea of building a Silver Eagle mint mark set. I looked around and couldn`t find any of them. I would include all of the associated sets too. 10th Anniversary, 20th Anniversary, etc. I saw a whole bunch of different type labels our there. Most of my coins had been certified by NGC. I decided to go with NGC, and I`m glad that I did. PCGS, in my opinion, is too picky and their high grade coins are few and far between and therefore more expensive to buy. Once I was focused on NGC`s labels, I tried to figure out what all the different labels meant. There was a series of Anniversary Set labels, next was the Liberty Series, etc. I decided to only collect NGCs sole proprietary labels. None that some other intity paid them to create. I would be a purest! So now, it was a mint mark and NGC label collection. Then I became aware of some odd labels. Labels that shouldn`t exist and are therefore must be rare and interesting. I don`t know about the wisdom of placing importance on labels along with the coins, but I enjoyed it, so why not? I also started thinking about First Strikes and Early Releases as a way to help seperate my set from others.
    That took me into the long wait to find a 2005 W Silver Eagle, First Strikes label in red. I saw that only 163 had ever been graded, making it the most rare of all NGC labels. When I finally found one, I had absolutely no idea of what its` real value was. Now, it`s been about a year and a half since I started my attempt at having a world class set. At that moment I was cash poor and coin rich. I traded for the 2005 W First Strikes. I won`t say what I traded for it, because that would make it totally obvious that I am an insufficiently_thoughtful_person and a babe in the woods. I did eventually atone for it, somewhat at least. One day, on Ebay, I spotted something wierd. It was a 2006 P Reverse Proof, PF70 that didn`t have a black 20th Anniversary label. Instead, it had a blue 20th Anniversary label. The label looked just like the one on the 20th Anniversary 2 piece gold and silver set. Maybe that`s how the mistake was made. I`ll never know. NGC seemed very surprised, and somewhat aggravated, that such a label existed. Of course, I bought it. That deal was okay. I was getting better at this, little by little. There are also some brown labeled Early Releases, and who knows what else.
    Until next time, take care coiners! - Rick
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