What Got You Hooked?

I've had some silver certs since I was a kid and a few coins. My dad was a heavy machine mechanic at a plant which had some sort of storm drain access where he parked near downtown. Something inspired him to lower a bucket into the drain and pull up buckets of silver coins. Mostly Mercury dimes and some quarters, old nickles. Thus a bit of coin collecting was started but my folks are generally collectors and pickers. I only recently picked back up the hobby some 25 years later and realized I like paper and you can get pretty far with face value finds.

I'm a collectaholic.

It is really hard for me to not collect something that is attractive, has value, and related to numismatics. I usually look for more unusual items or ones that aren't in the heavy main stream, since they are usually cheaper. Once they get recognized though, they go up in price greatly.

Like over the past 10 years, I've been collecting more paper money (like fractional and obsolete notes) than other items and it has really started to take off. I hope I wasn't the one to blame? I miss the lower prices though.

I got into collecting by a friend back in 1975, when he gave me 2 blue Whitman Lincoln folders, about half filled.

Hello, I tend to go into details when I write stories, hopefully this will not be too boring. Speaking of which, boredom is what got me hooked into collecting paper money, more specifically, boredom while traveling. I traveled to England and Norway in 2008 and I ended up broke, I was traveling on a budget and Norway is one of the most if not the most expensive country to live in in the world so you can imagine my situation. I was in my apartment in Lillehammer, bored so much that I decided to get out of there and start walking towards the downtown area. On my way there, I kept asking people for change for my 5 kroner coin(I wanted to trade it for five 1 krone coins in change, hoping to eventually stumble upon a rare coin), I did the same with other denominations, asked people to change my five 1 krone coins for a 5 kroner coin, until I get the earliest dates I can on a coin, then I would keep it. Then I had to go to England to catch my flight back to Canada, I had to wait at the airport overnight, plus I had to wait until like 4pm the next day to catch my flight. I took that time to walk around in the airport and did a similar thing I did in Norway, but with pence coins of course.

Eventually got home, that experience got me really interested in buying some coins. So I did. Three years later, I stopped being interested in coins and started being more interested in paper money. First, there are less paper money collectors than coin collectors(so I've heard), so it makes you feel like you belong to a more exclusive group, which I like. There are less varieties(I think), which I like, and paper money is much lighter in weight than coins, which is a nice thing if you travel a lot.

Now I'm in Ecuador, just to spending the winter over, it's not really vacations. I got to a point where I was extremely bored(yes, again). Also, I have this stress of finding a job and find an apartment when I go back home, because I lack those two things obviously. I took a lot of time to think, and I realized, I'm not going to want to work for someone for the rest of my life, this is surely not the way I want to live my life. So I thought, what if I can earn a living dealing paper money, which is something I love to do. Please don't get me wrong, I find collecting paper money very amusing, I would not do it only for the money, but the opportunity to do something I love, without being bossed around and earn a living out of it. Anyway, I did some research about becoming a dealer and this has now become my life's goal. I'm very confident I can learn along the years, by constantly buying paper money and taking a notice at the prices, learn to recognize a great deal when I see it and not so good ones, eventually get a big enough collection to become a dealer :)

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