I was looking through a dead relative’s old coins and such they had stored away. Not sure if it’s as common now but there were just boxes and boxes of coins sold by the mint. Proof sets, commemorative coins, special editions that sort of thing. I know a lot of old people buy stuff like this, and this was just one person that had years and years of the stuff.
I googled the value of these coins and they are all essentially worthless or just maybe face value or something. Why do people buy this stuff? It seems like quite a racket for the US Mint, I wonder just how much money they’ve made off these things.
I do not believe the US Mint represents the coins to have any specific value. It is a means of raising money, a voluntary tax in a sense, and they don’t hide that fact.
Also many people buy from places other than the mint. We have a couple of local coin shows per year and there are lots of dealers there selling proof sets and special coins.
Proof sets, commemorative coins, etc. have always been targeted to collectors. There’s a whole association built around collecting. Now some of those collectors might also have been speculators, but when I was growing up I knew a lot of collectors who collected for the sheer enjoyment of it. And if a proof set was struck at a higher pressure onto a more highly buffed blank, that made it prettier.
yeah there’s been tons of commercials with companies selling us money that’s supposedly worth something, in fact, one popular infomercial is “rick tomaska’s us coin show” that looks like the home shopping network/qvc channels touting various coins for their “investment value”
It’s a hobby. It costs money but I don’t see how you can call it preying on people. It’s not like the mint is telling people they might be in danger if they don’t buy commemorative coins.
The U.S. Mint doesn’t prey on oldsters, but the Franklin Mint does. My company did their “trading floor,” shown in ads, but they are really just telemarketer workstations.
The US Mint is extremely restrained and conservative. I’m sure there are shady resellers, but there’s not really a way to get preyed upon by the US Mint itself. And some of the things you’re looking at, like the proof sets, weren’t ever expensive to begin with.
hell on e-bay ive seen people trying to convince others that a whole state quarter collection is worth 50-100 bucks and “will appreciate in value”
personally, i like stamps better and would kill for the StarWars collection …not because it would be worth anything tho …
The Franklin Mint may have been scamming them, but US Mint proof sets are not in any way marketed as an investment, nor is it possible to spend investment-level money on them without buying whole crateloads. A 1968 proof set sold for the princely sum of $5; it’s not worth much more than that today, but plenty of the stuff people bought for their personal enjoyment in 1968 is worth a lot less.
It’s a relief to learn the proof sets weren’t too expensive
They were on a subscription or mailing list for Franklin Mint. Something came in several times a year.
Right now the market is flooded with this stuff. A lot of estates are unloading it. Maybe in twenty years the value will gradually turn around. I know it’ll never be worth a lot.
My grandfather bought bunches of these sorts of sets, and after he died, those, and the silver dollars he kept in coffee cans, were divided among his 3 great-grandchildren. When we took my daughter’s share to a dealer, she ended up with several thousand dollars, mostly from the silver dollars and silver quarters. All the sets in the fancy plastic cases were probably worth less than my grandfather paid for them.
He definitely bought them as investments - they were never on display. I hate to think how much he wasted buying all that.
And we’ll not get into the Franklin Mint vases that my sisters and I were bequeathed. Ugly dust collectors, the lot of them.
Thanks to eBay and such the value of a lot of mass produced “collectibles” tanked. There are still a lot of people who haven’t gotten the message, never mind 20+ years ago.
There are still valuable pieces of old junk being sold online. But it’s a rather capricious thing. You never know whether that thing grandpa kept in his tool box is worth 25 cents and a thousand bucks nor really why.
A few years ago at work I explained to someone that I did no billing. He returned later that day with the money; some ones, some fives, and fifty quarters, each with dried glue on them.
This brought to mind the insanity around Beanie Babies some years back. My nephew had a whole bunch, plus he had catalogs, and he was always telling us how much his collection was worth. He couldn’t wrap his little head around the idea that they were only worth what someone would pay him for them. I think most of them wound up going to Goodwill.
As I inferred in another thread, Ty Warner is the only person to get rich off Beanie Babies, but he got insanely rich.
The Franklin Mint’s “trading floor” was part of their office’s tour for [del]suckers[/del] investors, complete with displays tracking the ever-increasing value of collector plates from previous years. I think the gummint finally cracked down on that grift.
In yet another thread I spoke of how confusing my personal life is, but that ain’t nuthin like my work life. The only common thread running through my resume is that only my latest company is still in business. It’s a bloody graveyard.
mint sells basic proof set now for $27.95 but it does not include the quarter. It includes Kennedy half dollar and Sacawega dollar. Total face value is $1.61.
As I’m sure you know, serious collectors of things don’t buy them for an investment. They do it because they enjoy it. I collected coins for quite a number of years, mostly silver, because shiny. I also had some gold. Also a bunch of rolls of the state quarter series, knowing they had no real value. I finally tired of it and took most of it to a local coin dealer, who wrote me a check for about $15K. Pretty sure I made money on the whole thing, but in general it’s a poor investment. I broke open all of the state quarters, took them to the bank and ran them through the coin machine. Got about $400 out of that, which was nowhere near what I paid.
The problem with selling silver or gold coins these days is that the bullion value is so high that dealers are unwilling to pay much of a premium for the collecting value unless the coin is truly rare or scarce. Most of the silver coins they buy are then sold to the Chinese, who melt them down. I still have a very few proof US silver dollars that I kept because they do have a high resale. I’ll probably give them to any grandkid who is interested in that sort of thing.
