Collecting 1981 Mint Sets: My New Coinweek Article

Great article with countless great points.

It's truly incredible just how overlooked all the moderns really are. The '81-S dollar comes just awful. Sure there are lots of fairly well made coins in the mint sets but they are all marked and most are badly marked. Just a nice decent Gem appears only in about every 250th mint set yet this coin gets no premium. Can you imagine how much attention it would draw if it were this scarce and "just" a variety? It would sell for thousands probably but here's an issue available nowhere else and it's just simply ignored.

The Philly quarter is interesting in this set as well. About 95% of them have unattractive surfaces. They are simply not smooth. These often come very high grade but finding nice attractive coins with flat surfaces is tough because the majority of the dies used for these were misaligned. There's also an interesting variety on the Philly quarter that gets little attention. About one in 160 has a type "d" reverse which was later modified and used on all quarters after 1984. It is quite different with the Pick Up Point being a greater distance between the right side of the N in UNUM and the eagle's head.

The '81 is a great set and sells for about as little as it ever has. All these coins appear as nice PL's once in a while.

Keep up the great work. You have at least one big fan.

I may just go ahead and spend a saturday doing something like this one weekend. The sets themselves are pretty cheap and could get a bunch of them at one time from a local coin shop near me who just has stacks and stacks of sets in all dates.

What do you mean when you fill the tube you sell them? Do you sell for more than face value as a special roll type thing or just use them or really just depends on how lucky you were with the sets you got?

I do really like the cardboard holders but for something like this it would be much easier to just use flaps which I do happen to have a stack of and would be nice to put them to good use.

Looking at the price chart and just how difficult some of the smaller coins are to really tell I dont think it would really be worth the risk for me to try dimes or nickles or even cents really despite the nice premium if you hit the cent. But I dont mind taking some chances and I'm sure I will end up sending a cent or two.

CC thanks for the help. I'm just going to assume my first batch will be a sunk cost in learning and hopefully the 62s and 63s will be a thing of the past after the trial run. Any advice for the best way to open the mint sets? I've broken coins out of slabs before but never a mint set

Might give it a shot next saturday Ill let you know how I think it went and then how PCGS tells me it went lol. But I think when I remove them the ones I'm sending in anyway Ill try and just slide right into the flips without touching them

Clad thanks for the advice about the looking one after another. I have some old graded commems I was planning on using as a reference but I like your idea a lot. I still expect it to be hit or miss on the first run. I'm guessing the sets are only like 10 or 15 dollars if I'm not mistaken from a quick search. If thats the case ill probably get 10 or 20 use youre method try and sell some off and then get another 10 or 20 and scan again then compare what I pull out to what I already have. After that I will send in my best 3 or 4 coins just to see how I do. If I get close or hit something ill definitely continue but if I am WAY off that may be the end of the experiment.

This would be my first serious journey into proof sets other than collecting the silver ones. I think I'm going to stick to the quarters and dollars unless something really pops out. I would like to try pennies to but am just so unfamiliar with them and what to look for

The latest bid I have for the set is $7. It contains $4.82 face value. The SBA's each bid over $3 each so if you sell the rolls you'll have about a $3 profit on each set. I assure you this will not be as easy as you might think. Making money in coins is rarely easy so go slow at first and expect an education. I can tell you straight off the bat that if you can find a buyer for '81-S SBA's they won't want ugly and unattractive specimens and nearly 50% won't be saleable.

In only 15 or 20 sets you won't have a lot of keepers. A penny, a couple dimes, a quarter, a half, and a Denver dollar are about what to expect. One of these is probably nice enough to submit but it will be only a twenty or thirty dollar coin in all likelyhood so the profit is very small. You never know and there are sapectacular coins that show up in the sets. This is just the probability. You might get one set and have several coins that go for huge premiums.

I mostly just set the coins aside. Eventually people will wake up and realize they didn't quit making coins in 1965 and will want a set of them. If no one set any aside there would be no coins when it happens because they would all get into circulation. This might sound funny to most people that coins with mintages in the tens and hundreds of millions are scarce but it has happened in one country after another allover the world. Coins with enormous mintages either aren't available at all or are only available in poor condition. US moderns will never really be rare in uncirculated condition but many of these dates were rare in Gem even in the year they were minted and the decades have been most unkind to them. People don't pay any attention to them and they end up in circulation or worse.

I've thought the day moderns would spike higher was at hand for 40 years now (1972). In the early days I was far more concerned with the rush coming too soon before I had the chance to complete all my collecions and take a financial position in the coins. Of course everything is different now and I've been promoting the coins for over a quarter century.

But, I still believe each day that goes by not only brings us closer to the day of reckoning but makes the spike ever stronger. Every day more of these coins are being lost because there is no demand. Mint sets get cut up because they sell for peanuts and all or most of the coins enter circulation. Circulation simply works as a meatgrinder that soon removes the coins from collectible condition.

I assumed the prices would skyrocket because most of the coins were as scarce as the '50-D nickel after only a few years. The '50-D got up to a couple hundred dollars in today's money. But over the years the populations of these coins have been severely impacted by attrition caused by lack of demand. To make matters worse today's collector doesn't especially value typical condition so everything from a clad dime to a bust dollar has only nominal value in typical condition. Collectors demand quality which means no scrapes or excessive wear on a bust dollar and Gem or near-Gem quality for a clad dime. Here is where moderns get tough; in near-Gem condition. Uncs are scarcer than '50-D nickels and Gems can be downright impossible.

But collectors don't know this and generally don't know that mint sets tend to not be picked over. They don't know that for the majority of issues the finest coins are in the mint sets. They don't even know that almost all coins in mint sets are well made and it can be very difficult to find well made coins in rolls. They don't know that many moderns aren't available in rolls because they weren't saved.

They simply don't care about collecting the coins because they percieve them as common and debased junk. But every day that goes by there are more people who use the coins day in and day out and don't associate the loss of silver with them. Rather than seeing the heavy hand of government destroying good money they see old and new coins being used to purchase things and make change. Each year there are more collectors and fewer surviving mint sets. When these trends conflict prices will rise and then spike as everyone suddenly wants to get on board.

This is happening with modern coins all over the world and I don't know why it wouldn't happen with ours (at least in the long term).