Respect Your Elders...It Might Make You Money

Silverpicker Digest - Issue #9

Author

Max Hockley
October 27, 2023

What do you think of my wordplay at the beginning of these newsletters? If you’re not a fan, maybe you’ll come round to them eventually…

Or not. In any case, I welcome your notes.

This week, a BIG sale over at Heritage Auctions, plus a new video on how that $2 bill in your wallet might be worth serious money…or not very much at all.

But first, pop quiz, hotshot (answer at bottom of email): What US coin was the first to have the phrase “In God We Trust?”

We’ve all been there.

You’re eight years old. It’s Christmas, or Thanksgiving, or your birthday. Your grandparents call you over and present you with a $2 bill. You thank them politely like you were taught to do, and go back to your model train set or Nintendo.

At the time, you don’t know what to make of it. But, years later, you know better. You’re getting deeper and deeper into the world of coin and currency collecting. Maybe you’ve subscribed to a newsletter or two.

And you start thinking…Maybe my grandparents knew what they were doing? 

Well, here it is. The video you’ve been looking for, telling you once and for all if the $2 bill you’ve kept all these years is worth a lot more than $2.

You can always dig up the model train set if it isn’t.

This week’s question comes via Reddit:

Another question I get a lot. It’s important to say that you can replace “Franklink Halves” with any coin, but the premise of the question remains the same, and it’s one I’ve been confronted with myself when I’ve bought collections over the years.

So, sell the full set, or break it up and sell each coin individually?

Well, the answer is: it depends. Both options are valid, depending on what your goals are. Let’s break it down:

Selling Full Set vs. Individual Coins

  • If your goal is to maximize profit, then selling the coins individually is the way to go in most cases.

  • However, if you’re looking to maximize your time - which is also valuable - then selling the full set together is probably the solution.

You’ve got to do a little math here. Selling each coin individually on eBay, for example, means:

  • Photographing 100 coins, obverse AND reverse, in good lighting. That’s already 200 photographs.

  • Create 100 listings on eBay

  • Wait for all the items to sell, potentially answering questions, etc.

  • Once they’ve sold, packaging and managing different deliveries (they won’t all sell at the same time) - potentially going to the post office 100 times!

That’s a huge chunk of time. And if you’re getting 300% more than what you would have got selling the set together, then maybe it’s worth it. In most cases, it’s probably not.

One qualifying point here: if all the coins are in mint state, then you definitely want to sell them individually as they’re likely to do very well in an auction.

Pop quiz answer: Well done, those of you who got it - you go straight to the top of the class. The answer is, of course, the Two Cent piece in 1864

See you next week!