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Posted 02/22/2009 12:09 pm
The 750,000 estimated mintage comes from studying the coins themselves. If a late die state example exists, the we can assume the die lived its full life. The full life of a die is about a million coins.
The $100 in unsearched solid date coins comes from hours spent sorting them, or paying someone face value to sort them like I do. I have four relatives who will sit and sort boxes of cents into dates. Makes searching through them far faster, and finding the die varieties far more realistic. I would get $100 in 1995 cents out of about $2,500 sorted...but I would also get all the other dates with that, so the cost of doing so can be averaged out.
If a person really wants to find die varieties and make some money at it, they have to dedicate a couple thousand dollars to buy coins at face, and will spend a little better than 100 hours sorting them. That can be done by the family around the TV or by giving someone out of work something to do with their time while making some money for their time and effort. It's an ongoing process, but in the end you spend about 5c in time and effort to view each coin. You then get one cent back for each reject coin taken back to the bank. Each die variety found costs somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 each in overall expense. Of $2,500 face, I would find roughly 500 die varieties worth an average of $10 each. $9 profit from each coin reaps $4,500 profit from $2,500 searched, not counting the time spent finding them, which would otherwise be wasted watching TV or something else of no added value...that plus the $2,500 comes back when the coins are cashed in.
Something else to add to this...pre-1983 brass cents might be worth over a cent in copper value, but smelting costs would cancel the profit, not to mention it's still illegal to melt them and probably always will be. Best way to take advantage of them, if you plan to do so, is to sort them into bags and sell them for double face to people who are speculating they will be worth the effort some day. My personal thought...they won't be worth it for a long time to come, and the storage cost and tying up the capital isn't worth it. I'd rather just get rid of them.
The $100 in unsearched solid date coins comes from hours spent sorting them, or paying someone face value to sort them like I do. I have four relatives who will sit and sort boxes of cents into dates. Makes searching through them far faster, and finding the die varieties far more realistic. I would get $100 in 1995 cents out of about $2,500 sorted...but I would also get all the other dates with that, so the cost of doing so can be averaged out.
If a person really wants to find die varieties and make some money at it, they have to dedicate a couple thousand dollars to buy coins at face, and will spend a little better than 100 hours sorting them. That can be done by the family around the TV or by giving someone out of work something to do with their time while making some money for their time and effort. It's an ongoing process, but in the end you spend about 5c in time and effort to view each coin. You then get one cent back for each reject coin taken back to the bank. Each die variety found costs somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 each in overall expense. Of $2,500 face, I would find roughly 500 die varieties worth an average of $10 each. $9 profit from each coin reaps $4,500 profit from $2,500 searched, not counting the time spent finding them, which would otherwise be wasted watching TV or something else of no added value...that plus the $2,500 comes back when the coins are cashed in.
Something else to add to this...pre-1983 brass cents might be worth over a cent in copper value, but smelting costs would cancel the profit, not to mention it's still illegal to melt them and probably always will be. Best way to take advantage of them, if you plan to do so, is to sort them into bags and sell them for double face to people who are speculating they will be worth the effort some day. My personal thought...they won't be worth it for a long time to come, and the storage cost and tying up the capital isn't worth it. I'd rather just get rid of them.
