Sometimes You Just Need To Buy Yourself A Present

For me, the current sometime is right now as I'm finishing up my first year of graduate school. I thought I ought to get myself something particularly nice which would ordinarily be out of my price range and would give me a start on a new collecting goal.

And I remembered that when I was younger, I used to collect the State Quarters by pulling them from my change and plugging them into one of the various albums they had for them or into my nice little map of the U.S. with coin holes in it. I found some of those quarters again last summer, sitting undisturbed, and my first and only thought with them was that I should really just pull them out and use them to add just a little more money to the wedding fund.

And I did. It wasn't much, maybe $20 or so in quarters, plus another $10 or so in clad Bicentennial quarters that I'd saved, but it did its job. But thinking back on that got me thinking again about the State Quarters. They came out not long after my dad got me into collecting, so there's some degree of fondness there.

The thing about my usual interests in American coins, though, is that clad quarters really aren't that interesting to me. Clad coins in general, actually. I much prefer silver coins above anything else, just like my dad does, and half dollars are my favorite U.S. denomination to collect (I have a near-complete Whitman folder of Franklins missing only five coins now). I also really like proof coins - my major U.K. collecting is based around proof sets.

So I got to thinking, and I decided that what I needed to get started on was getting U.S. Silver Proof Sets. The idea had been kind of sitting in the back of my mind for a while, but here was a fleshed out thought on it. And I could use it to get the State Quarters at the same time, all in a way that would keep my collection happy. So I went shopping around and finally settled on knocking out one of the biggest pains of the Silver Proof Set collection out right away - 1999.

Oh, I'll begin picking up the ones before 1999 soon enough, and slowly working my way through the 2000s after. But knocking out 1999 and getting one of the big hurdles out of the way makes me happy, and in two weeks I'll be done with my first year as a PhD student. Fourteen years ago, when these coins first came out, I was ten-going-on-eleven. I probably won't celebrate the end of each year of my PhD quite this way, but I will definitely be making a nice purchase five years from now, when I expect to defend my dissertation. Probably an Iowa Centennial Half Dollar - I'll have spent six years in view of the Old Capitol by that point and it'll be nice to have a coin featuring a portion of my university.

But enough about that. You're probably here because you wanted to see the coins. I have a couple photos, nothing too special because I'm not the best photographer. But the coins look beautiful, and I'm happy that I was able to get them for under a hundred dollars, too.




And, to open this up a little, I'm curious what kinds of special occasions you guys and gals have seen fit to purchase yourself something a little nicer and above your usual price range and what you got. Please share and tell your stories, because I love a good story attached to a coin.

And it looks like I accidentally posted this to the wrong forum. Could a mod be so kind as to move this to the Main Coin Forum, please?

*** Moved by Staff to a more appropriate forum. ***