A Dry Spell!

I definitely understand what youre saying. It always seems like when you have a lot of available funds the things you want are hard to come by but as soon as youve spent your budget for a month everything you want appears out of no where.

It definitely gets old though searching over and over and over again finding nothing you want. I'm not at that point yet where my sets are so full its really hard to find things, but I have gotten there for a few things and I've been ignoring them lately after having every search come up empty for a while.

I've been going through the same stage at the moment. What I am doing is to cull some of the duplicates in my collection to free up extra funds. I have a habit of hoarding coins especially if they are a bargain. This actually helps later down the road as some can become scarce a few years later.

austrokiwi:
What sort of coins do you collect?
Maybe it is time to expand your numismatic horizons.

I started out collecting coins of my own country. Fairly typical for most people.
When I had completed a full set of what I was looking for, I became frustrated.
So I asked myself 'What can I collect in a series that is impossible to complete?
Over a period of time that answer for me was 'ancients'.

One problem:
I knew next to nothing about them.
So I took to reading about them, without acquiring a single item.
This period lasted two years for me.
Along the road, I learnt a lot about ancient history as well.

Then I acquired my first ancient coin.

It was a denarius of Antoninus Pius, with the modius and corn ears reverse. VF, it cost me four dollars. That was in 1965!

My next acquisition was a gold stater of Philip 11 of Madecon with the Apollo obverse, and biga reverse. Thunderbolt below the biga, which indicated the Pella mint. VF condition. By that time, I knew a fair amount of historical background about the piece, but my ability to identify a fake was next to zero.

So I made an inquiry to Spink's in London. A reply came back a few months later, saying they had an example in stock. The price was 350 Pounds. I decided to buy. I still have all of the documentation that relates to this coin, including polaroid photographs, to prove provenance, should I sell it. I have actually visited Pella in Northern Greece, where the coin was originally struck. Funny, I didn't find any trace of the mint that made the coin, after a period of 2,300 years!

That coin is the 'piece de resistance' in my collection of ancients, that numbers about 100 pieces. I have since acquired three other ancient gold pieces since then as well.

However, I still got frustrated at times, so I expanded my numismatic horizons further.
I now collect ALL coins, ancient to modern, up until about 1950, when silver had been withdrawn by most countries around the World, as a circulating medium.

These days my collection numbers around 4,000 coins, and the majority of them would be valued at less than $10 apiece.

To keep my numismatic interest going, I also randomly take all commemorative coins from circulation. After I have perhaps 1,000 coins, I will do some some sort of population research on them, I will retain the best example of each, then release the rest back into circulation. I will post the results of that researech here in the CCF.

Its a seemingly simple focus that I have complicated:
I collect Original and Re-strike Maria Theresa talers plus the coins that tell the story of the rise and perpetuation of this trade coin. A good part of my collection would be regarded as a re-strike MTT reference collection as it holds a fair proportion of the known varieties. But the whole collection covers from 300 ad (Axum: its actually part of the background story) jumps to the 1200s ( venetian ducat) next the 1500s and then concentrates on 17th,18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. I add coins on the basis that they help tell the economic and numismatic story (eg I have a circa 1520 Jochimsthaler guildengroschen and I have the last issue of the Schlick Family that was actually issued under Maria Theresa's) of the MTT.

Some of the coins I still want to add are effectively made of "unobtainium" and/or punitively expensive such as: 1780 Prague mint MTT, Bombay mint gold MTT presented to King Farouk, Arabian gulf gold Larin or a VOC Larin.

I too experience the same ebb & flow collecting patterns. Mine coincides with the start of the spring fishing season and runs until around the end of November, which coincidentally is the end of the fall fishing season. It opicks up a little between July and September due to the hot weather, and goes full throttle in the winter.