Clad Dimes Observations

I've been coin roll hunting with dimes and quarters for nearly two months now. The lower mintage dimes and quarters from the late 60s and early 70s aren't showing up in rolls that often. Its even hard to get the later 70s coins. The ones that I do see are at best VF or XF.

I've come to believe that these coins are more scarce than people realize. I think they are definately sleepers.

There are going to be some major sleepers in the '80's as well. There were very few people setting aside any clad at all but most stopped in 1984 when mint sets were resumed. To some extent this probably affected nickels and pennies a little as well. Now we take the '80's issues for granted since nice XF's can be found but this isn't going to last. The '84-P quarter, for instance, has very low rims so tends to get marked up very soon and severely in circulation. This coin wasn't saved in rolls and once had a large premium but its low quality ate away at the premium. The few people who care about a nice '84-P quarter can find one fairly easily by just buying three or four 1984 mint sets. Nice coins aren't tough in this set.

A lot of the '80's coins are like this; they're available now but supplies will dry up very quickly when people want to upgrade. While attrition isn't terribly high on the later mint sets like the early ones, mintages were lower. I think people might be surprised someday to find even a few post-'98 dimes are tough, especially non-SF '05 to '10 issues. It's hard to get a feel for how many dimes are being set aside now days but I'm still not seeing rolls of these in the coin shops.

Did you get these in circulation?

I saw Uncs until about 1988 but after that they were very few and far between and most were sliders.

I may have fewer '83-D dimes than any other clad because I started so late in accumulating them.