What Have People Found In Their First Year Of Coin Collecting? For Beginner

@justcarl said >> My only suggestion is to stay away from ebay. <<

I might disagree to some degree. 1. Not everyone has access to coin shows. (For instance, I live on a Caribbean island that doesn't even have a coin shop, let alone coin shows. So online auctions are my friend.) And for instance if you do live somewhere that does have coin shows, they're generally crowded and it might be a challenge to research something on the spot. They're an awesome place to browse and pick up a few things within your budget to just take a flyer on because you liked what you saw, and then you let the chips fall where they may. 2. I've encountered virtually in every case very honest people on ebay. Out of around 75 purchases since the beginning of the year, I've run across *one* person I'd never do a transaction with ever again because what I got didn't measure up anywhere near what was described. OTOH, most of my purchases are retail in nature, but then, I'm not looking for wholesale prices -- however, online auctions give you the chance to research at your leisure what might be a decent retail price so you don't get messed up too badly anyway. 3. There are a jillion other people more sharper than you who can spot a deal in their sleep and before you know it, the bid price hits the stratosphere and trying to compete with deep pockets is pretty useless.

But even there, there are many online auctions that aren't ebay where you can find some reasonably-priced things that you'llbe happy with and the seller ends up getting a reasonable price. And face it -- people sell stuff to make some money. It's the American Way, after all. It's up to us to search out those sites, do our research, and find a favorite or two to do business with. ebay is one of those; you just have to he a bit wary simpky because everyone and his brother is just slapping stuff up at whatever random price to maybe reel in a sucker or two. (And if you end up being one of those suckers and find out about it later -- and we all have -- it's called "live and learn." Mistakes is how we become better students. The thing is to not make a habit of being stupid.)

Pretty much all of us have overpaid for at least one or two things in our collections. The trick is not overpaying too much &

What I learned in my first year of collecting?

1) Coins are really neat to play with, especially if there's a lot of them!
2) There's a lot of different types of coins! There's the 1993 series and the 1992 series and the 1991 series and then there's the old coins from the 1980s that don't look much like any of them.
3) Coins can have different dates! It's so neat! (Not actually sure if I got to that in the first year.)
4) Apparently they have completely different coins in Israel! And there are dates in Hebrew letters, which is extra neat! (Definitely not sure if it was first year, but it was fairly early.)

...OK, I admit, I'm not sure when exactly my "first year of coin collecting" was, because my coin collecting slowly ramped up since kindergarten age.
The "coins can have different dates, neat!" revelation was in 1998, I believe (I would have been 6 years old then), though I might have already noticed different dates on Israeli coins before that.