Revenant

I think you'll get more / better response if you post this to the boards / forums proper and not to the journals, if your goal is to generate discussion anyway. As far as the policy goes... I'm hoping they'll change the policy or open up another means by which sellers can continue to offering these items. If not... Dec 31 2020 will probably be the last time I buy anything on eBay. If that's going to happen, for me, that's really going to suck as pretty much every coin for my 10G set and a large chunk of my buying for my Zimbabwe note set has been through sellers on eBay.

So.... what you're saying is that you have the attention span and self-discipline of a domestic cat? Good to know! All kidding aside - awesome pictures of an interesting piece.

I don't know when we'd be going but it wouldn't be until later.

Funny thing is silver is also about half the density of gold. So a 1 oz silver coin is almost twice the volume of a 1 oz gold coin. People usually point to this as a major weakness of silver as an investment in that it takes too much space to store very large sums (weights) of cash equivalent. but the coins are just a lot bigger and fun to hold in your hand in my opinion. A 1/4th oz gold coin - worth about $425 melt - is about the size of a nickel.

Does it have to be gold? When I started down this road about 12 years ago I collected a lot of modern silver 1 ounce bullion coins (NCLT). They remind me of my grandfather's silver dollars from when I was little. They're cool. You can get lots of different designs and series from all over the world... The Chinese Pandas, the Australian Koalas, Kangaroos, Kookaburras, the Mexican Libertads… all fun coins - and Silver is $14-16 an ounce lately.

With gold at $1700 (roughly) a 1/10th oz AGE is about $170 for melt. If it's a bullion strike and not proof or in some collectable box from the mint I think you'll still be looking at about $175 or above at normal times but premiums have been insane lately and that might push it to $185-190. 70-Graded examples on eBay seem to be listing for about $215-240 these days.

The TOP POP game can get particularly amusing / fun to laugh at in some cases where a somewhat unethical dealer will ask for moon money because they lucked into a "single finest top-pop" note or coin when they know full well that you can get uncirc examples by the bunch or by the roll for a couple of dollars per note / coin and there's probably a TON out there that could match or beat that example. I had a journal recently where I bought a coin for about $20 that was TOP POP by grace of the fact that it's literally the only one anyone ever sent to NGC for grading.

Well.... It should weigh 2.7 grams, not 3.1, but it should stick to a magnet. How sure are you that your scale is accurate?

Funny how that happens. My recent version of this was realizing that I had more Civil War tokens (graded and ungraded) than I remembered having.

I haven't been posting to this journal as much lately because my focus has been on my Zimbabwe note set the last 2-3 weeks and so I've been posting over on the PMG side - go look if you actually want to see me ramble about that hyperinflation set some more. I think I mentioned this before but I recently convinced my wife to let me violate the normal limits on my budget and use part of that Stimulus check to buy some of the coins I needed for my queen's beast sets - the last 2 Yales I needed and 4 of the White Lions. At this point I've gotten all 6 of the first 7 coins for the sets I'm building and / or giving away and I have 8 for 4 sets. While I have managed to talk Shandy into this, Ben has positively made out like a Bandit. We decided to get him a playset for the backyard so he can get to swing and have a slide as lockdown starts on it's 3rd month for us - we're about 58 days into our self-isolation now. We found out in the course of our shopping that my mother-in-law had been thinking about getting him one too, so we decided to combine the $300 we were considering spending with the $200 she chipped in and got him something nicer. We spent $25 to add a baby swing seat to it in place of the normal 2nd swing so Sam could swing too. Building this was awful. It took two whole days to building this the other weekend and when it was over I was hurting... just. ouch. So Ben is living high on the hog now between this and the sandpit (and 650 back breaking pounds of sand) that we bought for his birthday. Then I decided to go and sweeten the pot this week... Almost exactly a year ago I bought this four gun set of two single-shot pistols and two single-shot "break barrel" rifles as Ben's first nerf guns. They were $20 for the set so I figured it couldn't go too wrong. We also got some water guns at the time, because it's May in Texas. These things weren't the best for shooting / fighting with but they were a good starting point. Ben was 3 and he wasn't physically strong enough to prime the rifles or guns yet. Recently though he's demonstrated the ability to prime the rifles (but not yet the pistols) on his own and he's been showing more interest in playing with them and shooting at cans as target practice (what he calls "can practice."). Based on that I decided it was time to get him new rifles that are able to load more than one dart and fire faster. So I went looking and found these rotating-drum guns that have a 20 dart capacity and which you don't have to break open to load. At $20 each these were as much as the whole set I got before but it's still a great value IMO that we'll get a lot of fun with. I got two of them because you have to have more than one for fighting with. <.< It's necessary, ya'll! In the course of doing this I found something very cool that I decided I wanted... It was almost as expensive as the other two combined but... who can say no to that!?! It's cool! A clip-loader with a bi-pod and a scope!! My wife has been teasing me about this and my excitement over it for a week now... By her own admission though she's wanting to take it and play with it too though! Once we get them in the mail and they wait the required 3 day mail quarantine period - assuming Ben isn't grounded for a lot of bad behaviors he's been exhibiting lately - we'll get these out. I'm super excited to see how he responds to these and how excited I'm sure he's going to be and I'm excited to play with them with him. Once I see what he responds to I may be buying a 3rd of the drum-loaders and / or a 2nd one of the sniper / assault rifle.

I didn't say that... But I won't crash the thread too much. I'll say something more later.

In the r/Silverbugs Reddit the recurring joke is that the silver is lost in a "boating accident."

My wife and I aren't / weren't in the same boat as her but we're already in the category of having more in liquid savings than ever before. It had been taking a long time for us and our reserves to recover from my long unemployment and then the financial disruption of Sam's birth but it's done now. I feel like I'm one step away form putting on my tin-foil hat some days but I've been making some long-term minded purchases lately - getting my wife and I new shoes (good branded shoes in unpopular colors that I got for $40 a pair). Buying a backyard playset so my sons can have playground equipment that we control exclusively that they can play on during lockdown that will last for them for the next 5-8 years. Buying some nerf guns for my son(s) that are from a good brand that they should be able to get low / no cost fun out of for the next 4-8 years... Lots of thinking and actions lately with a 2 to 8 year time horizon on my mind.

If you were making minimum wage or close to it you'll be making more than you were when working - for 4 months. After that... not so much. The people who aren't working also aren't spending money on gas for their cars and aren't eating out or haven't been. There's also been a thing going on where people have been getting rebates on car insurance because of something the government did - my wife and I got $50 back from Nationwide. Between tax refunds, the stimulus checks, them waiving student loan interest and payments for 6 months, the insurance rebates... some people are getting insane cash dumps right now. It's not going to last. It isn't even generating the sugar-high the Fed and Trump were hoping for. But certainly the people that haven't been laid off and the minimum wage workers getting more on unemployment than they were working are doing unusually well... for now.

Well, unfortunately, even if your 401K bounces back with the DOW you aren't going to be thrilled if you're unemployed. I'm not convinced that gold will be shooting up anytime soon - even though you have BoA and even Jim Cramer talking it up intermittently - just because there have been polls and studies showing that 90% of people are using those stimulus checks to either save or pay down debt and people are not spending on nonessentials and people are going to cash, which in the short term will be deflationary and not inflationary.

It's an interesting read but... I don't imagine this will make many collectors happy. It might make some dealers happy. It might make some speculative short-term flippers happy, but I don't see how a debt-fueled bubble in the collectables market is going to be good for collectors, the community or the hobby. I don't see how more people seeing this hobby as an investment is going to be good for the hobby long term. Just my 2 cents.

I give props to PCGS here for taking great photos. I can't see anything that suggests targeted retouching or editing of the photo. It just looks like favorable lighting. I try my best to get good lighting for photos on my 10G and '32 set. I take pride in the presentation of those sets as I'm sure the people paying for these photos want to take pride in theirs. I don't think there's a problem here. I think I actually do "worse" with my Zimbabwe set because I'll pull those into photoshop to straighten the note in the image and adjust the white balance to try to get the colors right, even through the holder. Some generations of PMG holders tend to cause photos of the notes to blue shift pretty bad.

If you're looking to make money by doing it you're probably right. It can be hard enough to recover grading fees on resale as it is for some coins. Recovering a 2nd round of fees and shipping can be darn near impossible unless you're dealing with high-end coins. But, I wouldn't call it a waste if he wants it. One of these days I'm likely to reholder my 10G set and maybe send some of the ones in fatties for review to see if they can pick up a point. Just reholdering these coins would likely cost close to $200 after shipping and fees but I would love to have all the coins in the set in the same generation of holder as I think that would make a great presentation / display for a set I've been working on for 12 years through highs and lows in my life. It's not all about money. It's a hobby. It should be fun. Sometimes you spend / lose money on a hobby that you never get back. Just one of the reasons why you're great, Bob.

She loves to travel and she desperately wants to get out and take a trip somewhere and is brainstorming all of these ideas about where to go and what to do when this is over. She's looking at taking a vacation for a long weekend to Colorado. In the middle of her research she figured out that the ANA Money Museum is in Colorado and she's trying to use a day there to tempt me into getting excited and agreeing to the idea. Does she know me too well or think I sell too cheap? That is the question. Edited to add: She later asked me, "What does ANA stand for anyway?" I've been married to this woman for 4 years, folks. Doesn't even know what ANA is. Just thinks "Money Museum" is enough to get me interested.

Have you contacted the seller? 49 / 50 is close. I could easily see that being an honest error / mistake. You might be able to just get a 2-5% refund to make up for it.

Around the start of our self-isolation my hair had been getting really long and my wife convinced me to just let her and Ben use the trimmer on me and make it short - finally lean into the hair loss that has been eating into my temples for 10 years. At the time I’d shaved my beard. Recently they did another pass to keep it short and I saw a picture of myself… Then I looked at the coins I collect, and I thought a little… Then I went to Google and Bing for photos… That’s not fair! That ain’t right! When I started building this set, I was 22 and I had hair on my temples! Curse you, male pattern baldness! Curse you! My wife says I have the hair but not the nose! Anyway... I hope that was good for a laugh for someone! Stay safe. Stay healthy. Today was day 43 of self-isolation for us.

I just picked up a 2016 Proof SAE for Ben’s birth year. My mother-in-law gave me a 2019 proof that she bought when she visited the mint at the end of last year. That gave me one for Sam’s birth year and I got a 1986 - for our birth year - years ago. Ben smashing the capsule for the 1986 the other week - forcing me to go shopping for replacement capsules - was what got this back on my mind, but it had been on my collecting agenda since I was given the 2019. Cash was a bit tighter back then and I had some other, (more pressing IMO at the time) collecting goals, but we’re in a good enough place now, for now, I think. Ben has continued to show interest in those proof SAEs in the mint boxes and was asking if he could have one to keep in his room. With the 2016 coming out of the 3-day quarantine we impose on all mail these days I’m going to let him keep the 2016 on his dresser. He may make me regret that but… at least when I bought a new capsule for the 1986 coin I bought 6… We opened the box together and now it's going to sit on a spot on his dresser that he picked for it - next to his other treasures, some of which are stolen from my old mini collection and other places. At this point, I have the 1/4th oz gold eagles in MS70 and these proof SAEs in the mint packaging for both boys. I considered going and getting PF70 graded proof SAEs and or MS70 1/10th oz gold eagles or PF70 1/10th oz or 1/4th ounce eagles for both of them. There’s really no shortage of coins made on their birth years that I could get for both of them but in so doing I’m going to try to make sure that anything I get and hold on to for one of them I get for the other one. I would hate for one of them to feel slighted in that regard when they reach adulthood. I’m still trying to complete several sets of the 2 oz silver queen’s beasts coins. I also took a major step closer to that recently - using a small part of that “Economic Impact Payment” to make an order with JM Bullion to get the rest of the Yales and most of the White Lions I need. At least one of each of these 5 sets will be ear-marked for each boy, but there are scenarios where each boy could end up getting 2 or 3 sets of them - now that we’re capped out at 2 kids I find that I’m building more sets than I probably want or need. But… silver is silver… My wife has challenged me on the point of fairness regarding the sets I’m wanting to let each of them have. I’m hoping to let Ben have my 10G set and Sam have the Zimbabwe note set. My wife pointed out that giving one of the boys a group of gold coins and giving the other one a group of demonetized notes from a dead currency wouldn’t exactly be “fair.” My response was that, at that point, Ben would get the 10G set and Sam would get most of the rest of the gold coins - and that would give both of them a roughly equal number of gold coins and a roughly equal melt weight, at least as things stand now. I can adjust as time goes on. I’m not going to deliberately create a situation where one of them gets shafted too badly. Hopefully they like it and keep it and don’t just take it all down to the pawn shop as soon as they get it. That would be quite the anti-climax after all of this work. At least I’ll be dead for some or all of that.

In looking at that 1880 10G coin I picked up a couple of weeks ago now one thing kind of stood out to me. There’s something on the left side of the Obverse that looks a lot like a die crack that runs between the K and one of the stars. Unlike a lot of the things you see people posting about in the Newbie forum you can actually see this with a naked eye and I think it really is a die crack and not a scratch - but I could be wrong. Looking closer under high magnification it looks like there may be some additional small cracks around the K. Funny aside, but I commented on seeing this to my wife and she was asking if this made me unhappy or made me like the coin less. Not at all as it happens, but it’s very interesting to me. Seeing this got me thinking about the topic of die pairings - you hear people talk about die pairings and die varieties with other series that have been studied extensively but you don’t really hear about it with this set / series. It occurred to me that this might be attributable to the fact that this series isn’t heavily “collected” by all indications and they’re mostly treated like bullion. Then another thought occurred to me: Are there actually die pairings to research with these coins? The annual mintages for this series are as follows: 1875: 4,110,000 1876: 1,581,106 1877: 1,108,049 1879: 581,036 1880: 50,100 1885: 67,095 1886: 51,141 1887: 40,754 1888: 35,585 1889: 204,691 Die life is a highly variable thing and depends on the size of the coin, the material of the coin and the time period in which it was produced. The mere existence of the 1879/7 variety shows that they weren’t making the 581,000 coins struck in 1879 from a single pair of dies. However, from what I can find with a little looking, it seems like in the 1880s, for a small gold coin, a die life of 50,000 or more would have been very reasonable and achievable. This means it’s possible and maybe even likely that all the coins in this series from 1880, 1885, 1886, 1887, and 1888 were all struck from a single pair of dies and that there are no dies to look at. It seems obvious to think about this now, but it’d never occurred to me before. If that’s true, and if I’m right about this being a die crack, that suggests that, if you could get and look at enough examples, you might be able to look at the progression of that crack over the course of the run and you could distinguish coins from early or late in the production run for 1880 based on the state / presence / absence of this crack. Trying to track down more examples and test this out might be fun in 30 years when I’ve made my millions.

It is Day 13 of our Coronavirus Self-solation. Frequent walks help make it not so bad with the stir craziness now. We’re taking the cars for short drives and driving out to the woods to walk around so that the cars don’t sit idle for too long. I thought it was a good day to have a bit of fun. A few years ago I ended up with two graded 1883-O Morgans in my collection. One is an NGC MS63 that I bought. One is a PCGS graded AU58 that another member here gave me when I bought a coin off them in the marketplace and it took a long time for them to get it in the mail so they sent me that AU58 too just to be nice. I’ve often thought about cracking that AU58 out of the slab because… it’s a circulated common-date Morgan. It’s not like the slab increases the value any and if I crack it out it can go in an album page and take up less room. Anyway. I decided today was the day. I was going to ask Ben to ‘help’ me and we were going to go for it. The nice thing about making a PCGS graded coin the victim is that it helps keep him from thinking he can take a hammer to the NGC coins... I hope. The thing is… I’ve always heard people talk about how easy it is to crack these slabs open and how it just takes a ‘couple of quick taps’ and yadda yadda. Except… We couldn’t get it open. And we hit that sucker hard a few times, on the edge and on the face. It didn’t break. It wasn't just the four year old hitting it! I hit it too! It suffered some clear physical damage, but it’s still together. This result in a number of ways makes sense to me. I was always confused by all the stories about how easy these are to break. It didn't make sense for something made for archival protection to be so easy to break - especially given the likelihood of drops. Still, I'm having trouble reconciling the stories I've heard with this experience. The children's show on the TV is called "Word Party." Ben loves it... I'm not sure why. This has honestly given me some new respect for the slabs. I have that thing a couple of pretty solid whacks on the edge. I would not have expected it to hold up that well. I’ve dropped these things on the floor a few times and nearly had a heart attach worrying they’d break because of what I’ve heard. But this? Wow. So… what am I missing here? Is there supposed to be a mystery-just-right way to ‘tap’ these open?

For months now I’ve been crossing my fingers hoping that I’d get a nice bonus and we’d be able to pay off my student loans and maybe finish paying for the cruise we’re wanting to take in October. I’m still waiting to find out about if I’ll get a bonus this year, but we just got a big surprise on our Taxes. Because we can claim an extra dependent this year and a couple of other things this year, instead of owing money we’re going to get some back and this is going to let us pay off my loans, pay off the cruise and have a little left over. We may be able to use that to eliminate one other debt and, if we can, that’d be three big bills / debts off our plate. I have to wait until the money comes in and we can’t file until we get one last form, but my student loans are as good as dead - 6 years early. My reward for paying 2.5 times the normal payment every month that I could afford it. “PIF by borrower” are wonderful words. … Now to start working harder on her student loans. That… will take a while and be fun. Hey, maybe, if I do get a bonus, I really will get to treat myself a little! As it happens, just in the last couple of days, an NGC graded 1880 10G coin has come up for sale in an old fatty holder with a 1959XX serial number. I’d be a perfect addition to my set but the seller’s asking price is a bit steep. If I get a good bonus, I may try to make an offer and see if they’ll take something more reasonable for it. If I don’t get a bonus and it’s still available in a few weeks I may just negotiate a deal with my wife, just like I did when I got the 1888 in early 2018. If it’s still available when I’m ready to buy, I’ll be really excited to get that coin. But getting rid of these bills will feel great. I do sometimes question if I’d be better served to have put even more towards the bills and less than I currently do to the coins and the hobbies, but this is my fun, this is how I treat myself, and there are worse ways I could do it. Yup... I'm probably going to have a hard time using most of that grading credit if I keep going for things that are already graded.