My daughter and I have been collecting coins for as long as we can remember. It’s a habit that has saved us thousands of dollars over the years. It’s been one of the things that has helped us stay on top of the money market.
When I hear price on a coin, I always imagine someone in the grocery store buying a large bag of cereal at 10 cents a bag. We have to make a few minor adjustments to the math, so the price we get for a dime is actually about a quarter less.
The first time I get a coin purchase, I think, “Oh they don’t have any, they just have to buy one before I go.” That is one of the biggest changes in the world of coin purchases. My grandmother was one of those people, and her home was the only place she knew how to spend a penny. What she thought she could spend was a penny. But she spent more that way than I.
The flip side to coin purchases is that you can spend more than you think you do. Like buying a new car, you can sometimes spend more than you think you do every time you go to a dealer. You can spend more buying a laptop than you think you are. But the most expensive thing you can buy is not a car or laptop.
I’m not referring to the $500,000 coins, but the $100 coins. A good coin will take you to the top of the money-stack, but a bad coin will take you to the bottom.
I haven’t found a coin that has fallen far from that top-to-bottom path, but you can’t have too much of a good thing. To make matters worse, the coin is a fake coin. The real ones are made of pure platinum and are gold-plated. Unfortunately, they are also real-coin-shaped. These fake coins are made of cheaper plastic and look like real coins.
The real question, of course, is how much money do you have in your wallet? I know, I know, you’ve got some. But there is not really a way to know for sure. You can check your bank statement for the last month, your balance for the last six months, or even your balance since your last transaction. But if a coin’s worth is determined by its value, it means you were really lucky to find it.
It’s almost impossible to predict the time of each transaction. It’s like a mathematical equation for how long a piece of paper has been on the paper itself. If someone had said, “I don’t know how much money you have in your wallet, but I’ll pay $5 for it,” they’d be talking about the $5 that you just spent on that piece of paper.
Well, that was easy. I mean, the whole point of it was that they were all really lucky to find something in the end. And if they wanted to be really lucky, they probably wouldn’t be able to find coins at all. And if you’re really lucky, you’re guaranteed to find something.
We are not dealing with a person who is just lucky, or a person who was just lucky. We are dealing with a person who has the exact right combination of factors. The coin was placed somewhere, and the people who placed the coin there did so with the exact right amount of time and in the exact right place. That is the luck.