My old coin collection changed my life for the better and provided me with a college education. If you haven’t read my book “31 Steps to your Millions in Antiques and Collectibles”, you should. In the first few pages I tell the story about how, with a young family and no money to speak of, I was able to attend Kentucky Wesleyan College and get a degree. Maybe I had $100 in my account, but through buying and selling American coins I was able to put myself through college.
Today I visited a young man that had inherited a house full of items after his mother’s death. Spending over two hours looking over hundreds of pieces, I started to try teaching him the principles that we use at the 31 Club. It was overwhelming with perhaps hundreds of custom jewelry pieces, most of little value and over fifty paper items from etching to prints that would make pretty wall hangings but nothing else. I am sure that he was disappointed because I showed so little interest in this assortment of garage sale items but why should I? It wouldn’t help him and I was in a position to help him but with what?
He led me through the house where he had wrapped and boxed what looked like hundreds more items that, from reading the notes on the boxes, will never pay for his time and work to store them. I could understand if they had sentimental value but I didn’t get the sense these items did. One day they will be drug out only to find that more time has passed but the contents of the boxes haven’t appreciated at all.
Here is where I try to save my reader time and effort. Don’t spend your time trying to make common items valuable. It just doesn’t work, no matter how much you desire it to. I was almost ready to say it was time for me to go when he asked if I would look at one more thing. My thought was why not, but truly I didn’t have very high expectations. We entered a bedroom where there was a card table loaded with cigar boxes and other containers holding hundreds of coins. Silver dollars, Liberty halves, Lincoln cents, Buffalo nickels, Liberty dimes, all the different types of quarters. I felt like I was back in college. He had spent hours on the things of very little value but nothing on the coins. There were uncirculated rolls of dimes, quarters and nickels. I even found mint uncirculated halves wrapped in tin foil. I tried to figure in my mind what this collection was worth but I had to stop when the figure got to the thousands. You see to him this collection was just a bunch of coins and he was trying to pick treasure out of junk when the treasure was right in front of him.
I think that you will find most people think just like this
