How Do You Plan Your Purchases?

So here are my answers:

I save up every pay period, usually I find a note/coin I want and then I save up when I have enough I buy it. Several members have let me buy some notes paying every 2 weeks. I generally like that arrangement. My local coin shop has gotten in a selection of pre 1933 gold, so I've been buying 1 paying it off and then picking another. My dealer is ok with it, as I pay cash and every 2 weeks.

I have also been known to save up and just buy it, but for items over $500 that takes me a while.

I will pick up some random lower cost items, that limit has been $250 and I don't do that often. I'll do that when its an item I want with a profit possibility.

My limit for a random purchase has been $250, I would go up to $500, but I would need to ask my wife.

My most expensive purchase has been $1500, I am planning on getting a type set of gold coins and 2 are about about $2500 so I will go up to $2500. On Currency my most expensive has been $800. I will go up to about $2500 for a few notes I want but that will take a long time to save up.

I'm now at the I want rarer items so I have seriously cut back on buying quantity.

What about you?

I will not bore you will all the details, but the answer is spreadsheets.

Interesting discussion. I don't necessarily have a plan, just disciplined behavior interwoven with a gut sense for thresholds. I suppose it helps that I'm not an ultra high-end collector.

I can relate.

Same. $200 has always been my mental barrier. I have gone above it five times, three of which were just above $400. That will not stand forever, since my last three Dansco holes are well above $500.

If there is a point in the universe that is furthest away from "planned purchases", that is about where I am.

My typical "plan for purchases" is roughly:
- Take cash out for coin show.
- Go to coin show.
- Buy all the coins I see that I like, until the money runs out or (rarely) there are no more desirable coins left to buy.

So in that sense, all my purchases are "random". I do have a "wantlist" of sorts, but I don't really know why I do that because rarely attempt to pursue or enforce it and don;t actually bring it with me to the coin shows. In terms of price caps, I have a ceiling of AU$1000 (about US$640 at current exchange rates ) for an individual coin. I have gone over that limit precisely once, spending AU$1250 in 2020 for an ancient Lydian half-stater.

I am enamored by coins ... always "looking around" and talking about it to whomever will listen. This has led to my collecting style ... "opportunity". Sometimes its a local auction, sometimes it's a call from my jeweler who found something, sometimes it's a request for an appraisal.

My favorite is to find a coin on the ground ... picking it up I say "In God We Trust" ... it rides in my pocket as a comfort :)

This is pretty much how it worked for me back in Moscow, though the relative lack of coin shows (that I knew of) meant that I usually went to hobby-themed malls (and/or flea markets) instead... at least there were multiple of those!

(I did occasionally have to save up when I had less than $50 left over in my coin-store-trip funds and it was just silly to go with this little. Fortunately, going to semi-permanent malls rather than sporadic coin shows meant I usually didn't have to care about missing any particular date.
I did also save up for the one big yearly coin show that did happen; but due to Covid and other interference I've only gone there twice, and the first time I missed some big deals due to not realizing they were big, while the second time the coins on offer were much more limited to overly modern and/or overly expensive, so I didn't find much worth buying at all!)

In Israel (so far) I had found neither coin shows nor coin stores, the latter with the exception of antique stores in especially touristy areas that sold coins as well as other antiques.
Reportedly some coin stores do exist but I have yet to find one; in any case it appears that there are none in my current smallish town.

The price I don't want to go over... used to be just $5 for a while, I think! Had to be something really special to go past that.
Then $10, then $20, and I think eventually $50, though in practice it was always less of a firm limit and more of a scale of "the more expensive the coin is the less I'm willing to buy it".

I guess here I need to define 'type set'. I'm not including the 1792 Half Disme, nor oddballs like the $4 stella, Gobrecht dollar.. I let the draped bust gold stuff represent the 'type' w/out the small eagle, that kind of thing.

As for question 4, "Is there a price you won't go over?", well that's pretty much my 7 remaining slots