Revenant

I mean, if you get them out really fast I think the old pricing is honored if you get it to them by 2/1. Honestly though I think it's probably over-due that they increase pricing since obviously at the price they're charging there is WAYYY TOO MUCH demand for their services. And personally I think if it was worth it to submit at the old price it's still worth it after a 5% increase - their price increase is actually even below the current rate of inflation. It's awfully darn reasonable of them.

Yeah, I mean, I'd been speculating / pricing out what the impact on my cost would be if they'd upped it to $20/coin for moderns just because that would have been just a bit over a 10% increase and would have gotten them to a "round" number, so I was half expecting that was going to be what happened. So in some ways I'm a little surprised / happy to see a pretty "restrained" ~5% increase for moderns. But with $29 coins and a $3 increase in return shipping for up to 30 low-value coins, this increase would have hit me for an extra $32 that I'm just as happy to not pay. And... yeah... Submitting silver NCLT is a bit of a pig and a poke unless you're submitting NCLT that is at least 5-6 years old. Because milk spots, if they are going to show, usually show up by then. Usually. I'm gonna be honest in that I think I'm mostly done with Silver NCLT unless I'm buying already graded and it is at least 6 years old or I'm getting a really good price on it. At this point I'm just getting so much more joy out of self-submitting low-value moderns that only I care about.

Makes me think of some of my early versions of my set banner images for my 500 Lire set... but then Mike and Shandy convinced me to dial it back. Mike said people might forget the coins.

Well, after the email I got today about the grading fees and the shipping fees going up effective 2/1, I'm really even more happy I didn't drag my feet on getting these in the mail. Edited to add: I'll admit I had been holding these back a bit hoping for Jan 7th and hoping an award might help me cover the submission, but Shandy can also attest that I'd been estimating / looking at what the submission would cost at $18, $19, and $20/coin, fearing that waiting for a possible award might get me hit with a price increase.

I received an email today that indicated that prices were going up and that all boxes received on or after 2/1 would be subject to the higher fees. I mailed off a box on Friday the 14th that had the grading and the return shipping fees calculated based on the old pricing. It should arrive at NGC this week but, with the delays on opening incoming mail, I'm thinking the box probably won't be opened until after Valentine's Day. Am I correct in thinking that both the grading services and the return shipping will be handled at the old rate, even if you don't open my box until after 2/1?

Call me crazy but I had thought they already had to pay to be an authorized dealer. For people that have a business that is an ongoing concern, I don't think $200 will move the needle much. For people that have just been sitting on it and not using it much, they'll probably get rid of it. Side note: I got the email recently about the price increases on grading fees. I wasn't at all surprised, but I was very glad I went ahead and got a recent submission off and in the mail.

Anything is possible, but the associate membership just gives you the right to submit coins. It doesn't afford the types of discounts this does (or an Elite membership for us non-dealers).

I took advantage of having the day off yesterday to box up the Zimbabwe coins and take them to the post office before Shandy and I went to lunch as a kind of pre-versary thing - today is the day. 6 years together. We were supposed to attend a wedding today for a cousin that will now share our date, but our child care got sick and Sam is dealing with his latest ear infection, so we decided to call some quiet time alone today and a nice lunch good enough and we'll try to just enjoy some stolen moments at home this weekend. I got some funny looks at the Post Office for wanting registered mail. And maybe it was a bit silly, but, while the value of the box is not great the value of the time invested into finding and picking those coins made it well worth an extra $10-15 to help make sure the box arrived okay. I sent a couple of submissions in last year via priority mail but those didn't have the significance or time invested that this one did or the association of having done it with her. This won't be the last submission to involve the Zimbabwe coins or the 500 L coins because I'll need / want to upgrade the 2003 $10 and $25 coins at minimum and I'll want to try to get 500L coins for 1983, 1986, 1987 and 1995. So there will be more down the road and that'll probably take the form of another mixed submission of Italian and Zimbabwean coins - maybe later this year. But, while I knew this wouldn't fully resolve the need I wanted to get this out and not start having me delay it with the idea of a few more coins. I feel it is more important to get what I have in the pipeline. I've also run afoul of just continuously putting things off a bit too long in the past and it cost me so I definitely don't want that again. The other possible consideration is that NGC is saying the $500 credit will show up "by the end of the month" - in contrast to prior years when they were usually saying 1 week after the announcement. I think this is another indication of how busy they continue to be. But, with them being 3-5 weeks behind in opening boxes, by the time my box gets there and they enter it in, the credit should be there. And I have a note about it on the form just in case. If they arrive on Jan 19th, the current 71 business day turnaround puts them finishing around May 5th, so I think there's a good chance we'll have these Z coins and those 500 L coins in time to being looking at them on Shandy's birthday in Mid-June. What was the Anniversary present this year? A P-46a Zimbabwe note in 68 EPQ. About the only 2nd dollar variety I still needed, echoing the purchase of the 68 EPQ 20T note three years ago that started me back down this road. But the mail carrier also brought me a new Venezuelan VEN 114 1 Million Bolivar note today in a bit of convenient timing. I still need that VEN104 though. Both are great additions to their respective note sets. She got a sapphire bracelet this year that goes with the necklace from last year. And she seems happy to wear them together this weekend.

I think those familiar with my lovely journal will know that my periodic bad spelling is one of its more charming features.

The raw stuff isn't worth much and is mostly a kind of family herloin that I hope they keep. The graded stuff I have a document that explains things - what I hope will go to each son. What I think my wife should sell after I kick it - and I think I'll go first.

I think I'll go with just banding them up in groups of 5 or 6 like usual. When I tried to fold the page and open it up at one point 2 or 3 just popped right out. I might be able to get around that by only using every 2nd row and pointing the slot openings inward... but at that point I think I just need to bundle them up. Shandy: "You reference Mike a lot." Me: "... I talk to Mike a lot. "

Nope! That's why i was thinking maybe rubber bands over the columns once folded up

There's a couple of things I can think of here: 1) They may not sell enough / have enough sale records to have a price in the guide. My 1932 set vs My Zimbabwe set: 2) When you have a wide screen, you see everything. When you narrow the display, the system drops some columns to keep things from getting cluttered: My '32 set when I narrow the window enough: Notice how the Cert#, the price and the eBay shop column all drop out. I never see those columns when looking on my phone.

Oh yes... Such fun... But yeah... Once the initial "pain" wore off I'd have looked at it in later years and laughed.

Yeah. I've seen / heard that too and said pretty much the same thing to Shandy at lunch today. Like I said: Major props to Ali. No clue how many of us have been looking at that and she's the one that actually noticed.

Thank you! It is a lot of fun to find a collection or a set that has a story to tell and then trying to tell that story. Mike is well aware of the Note set because he's one of the few others that is active on the PMG side as well and we talk a lot over there. I've made the comment in the past that I think projects and sets like this would make it really cool if we could have cross-registry sets that incorporate PMG notes and NGC coins, but I'm sure that's far easier said than done. I work around it in my own way by having the coin set and the note set reference each other and link to each other in the Set Descriptions. I've also considered, in the past using "extra" certification numbers for PMG notes I don't include in my Zimbabwe Signature set to incorporate images of the Bond Coins and other Zcoins into that set more directly. But I don't have a huge number of unused cert#s and that approach is just a tad clunky. As it is though, I'm mostly just happy and grateful that PMG and NGC include competitive categories for these coins and notes and allow for Signature / Custom sets. While participation in the PMG Zimbabwe Category has increased with time - perhaps in part because of my efforts, perhaps not - at the time they were added (around 2016) I was pretty much the only one that listed sets in them along with maybe 1 or 2 other people. Now I'm one of only two sets in the NGC category,. But maybe that can change with time. I did notice that there seemed to be a bump in participation in the PMG Zimbabwe registry after the note set won Best Presented last year.

I got an email today from Ali asking me if I really meant to use the word “Causalities” in the title of my set and not “Casualties.” She wanted to make sure I meant to do that before she sent the plaque in to be made with it printed like that. I read that email and immediately wanted to bang my head on the desk. I do not think I will ever ever know how many times I have looked at that and not seen that, but, props to Ali, she caught it. I missed it. Shandy missed it. I have to assume Mike never noticed it in all the times we’ve talked about this in DMs. One of those glorious times where you flip two letters and autocorrect / spellcheck says nothing because it is technically a properly spelled English word, just not the right one. She was great to flag this up to me and nice enough to email me about it but I’ll just ruin her discretion because I just feel like a catch like that deserves some thanks and public praise. She wasn’t going through and copying & pasting. She actually caught a subtle typo that so many have missed and then took the time to flag it up to me and I appreciate that so much, because now they’re also going to try to fix it in the announcement and in the archives and I don’t have to have that typo taunting me every time I look at that plaque. Oh jeeze… I’m going to be laughing about this for days. So, Thank you, again, so much, for that that, Ali. The correction and the laugh. As a small aside on this, perhaps as another indication that I hadn’t really seen that set as being "in the running" and saw it more as a work in progress and not a finished product, on the $1 coin in the set I just had a throw-away line saying that the reverse showed an old stone fort at the “Great Zimbabwe” ruins. I went back in last night and added more information on what exactly the Great Zimbabwe Ruins are but the more I look at it / think about it I still have some more work to do, adding some more information - like the fact that the ruins are a National Monument area and a UNESCO site, and the “Great Zimbabwe” civilization is where the name of the modern country came from, these ruins / this civilization is why they changed it from “Rhodesia” to “Zimbabwe” in 1980. (Probably, by the time you read this, I’ll have updated it.) One of the things I’ve tried to do as I picked and compared and swapped out coins from different batches from 5-7 different dealers / sources is keep a record of where / what batch each coin that’s about to be submitted came from, so I could continue to incorporate that information and the story of the chase / how the set was built into the descriptions for each coin. And I’m starting to write some of that out and explain it without being too long-winded and boring in the process. I’ve finished picking the seven 500 L coins that will go with the 22 Zimbabwe coins, filling out the paperwork and putting the labels in with the flips. About the only thing left is to pack them up and mail them, and the only thing holding that up is hoping for an answer from NGC on an approach to packing that I’m considering. In the past I’ve just had short stacks of coins and rubber-banded them together. This time I’m considering leaving them in a BCW page, accordion folding it and then rubberbanding that, and maybe wrapping a little bubble wrap around that. Anyone ever tried this? Have any thoughts? I’m trying to get these out to get them “in line” With turnaround times currently at 71 business days for World Modern I’m thinking we’re looking at May or June before the grades and the coins come back, even if I get them mailed off next week. This also has some implications for something else I want to try to do / accomplish this year that is a plan I'll talk about soon. But this has me realizing that, if I want the coins back before December, I probably need to try to get them out by April or May and dragging my feet and sending them out in June like I did last year might not end well for me.

I keep thinking the last day or so that, when I get the plaque in hand, I'll have to take some pictures with one or all of the following: 1) The PMG & NGC Zimbabwe Plaques together, 2) The NGC plaque with the Zimbabwe coins in the case when the 2nd coin submission comes back. or 3) The NGC plaque and the PMG plaque with the Zimbabwe coins and like the 100 Trillion Note or something. But it does feel quite nice to have both halves of this collection / project with Best Presented Awards and both collections spanning the entire History of the country from 1980-Date.

I'd remove the screen shots showing your physical address. But if that address is up to date you'll get your plaque mailed there.

I'm not sure when this was added but I love this addition to the website / submission tracker. So, thank you / the team / the webmaster for that one. Ouch! Thanks for doing your best!

Very sorry for your loss. No parent should ever have to lose a child.

In the past I've shipped coins to NGC with them in short stacks that I had wrapped in a rubber band or one of my wife's hair-ties. I'm getting ready to send in another shipment and I was considering leaving them in a BCW flip page, accordian folding it and wrapping the four coloumns with bands / ties - either that or just wrap bubble wrap around the bundle. I'm wondering if this would meet expectations for NGC on packing or if it would result in additional headaches and charges.. The Instructions that NGC gives on the website indicate how to put the coins in flips and to not cut, glue or staple, but it doesn't comment on how to bind the coins together and pack them

Not really. There was an error. It looks like they fixed it, but your claim that this cost you your #1 position was incorrect - It cost Deepsjordan the win. Nwade was on top yesterday and now that they fixed it Deepsjordan is winning. And so they gave the award ribbon to him/her. Based on the score histories it looks like you were behind them by about 400 points before today, so it isn't their rescoring that gave him the win over you.

Do you have a mailing address listed on your account? If so they'll send the plaque there. The plaques for the major awards are mailed automatically to the address on your account. The certificates for categories are digital downloads or you request that they send printed ones. But those also automatically go to the address they have for your account. So do you know how to check your account information?

Thank you. I've made the comment to her recently that I feel like I actually really hit a good stride the last few months with some journal entries that really dug deep into the journey and the hunt and not just, "Hey! I bought this this week." Nothing wrong with "Hey, I bought this! Ain't it neat," but I thought i was producing some good stuff there. Hopefully that continues a bit longer.