Your Most Expensive Mistake?

I haven't made an intentional mistake, but perhaps my most expensive accident isn't THAT bad.

Anyone remember when I won the gold Eagle from APMEX's September drawing? ( https://goccf.com/t/159684 )

Well it came back to bite me on my taxes, the feds took their pound of flesh in the form of an extra $800+ between Federal and State, which for a minimum wage gas station worker means I owed them a few hundred this year.

But since I did my taxes early this year, I had time to pay it off. And I still have that lovely Eagle, a gold-feathered nest-egg of sorts. (I'm a real bird-brain )

I spent £60 on some thai bullet coins which turned out to be fake...I keep one on my desk at all times to remind me to stay vigilant.

If you want to purchase a symbolic representation of my poor judgement, be my guest, I cant get rid of them soon enough.

Paying $55 for a $15 FE Cent. Aside from that all my transaction have gone OK to Extremely well for me.

Mine was a coin I bought at the last Stack's auction. Even though I believe it is worth what I paid for it, I absolutely hate the way it looks in hand. I barely could even afford to buy it, and I now have to sell off some nice coins in my collection to get some money back. (I knew I would have to do that anyway, but I didn't care at the time because the pictures of it made me really want it for my collection).

I wish Stack's had a return policy on coins like Heritage does. I'm just going to wait a year to sell it off and pray that I don't lose more than $100 on it. It was a very stupid mistake on my part, no idea what I was thinking.

My biggest loss wasn't too bad dollar-wise, but it still gets to me.

I bought a toned Uncirculated 1910 Barber dime for around $40.00. It had a deep gray tone, but decent luster and I thought I got a pretty good deal on it.

I later decided to put it up for auction on ebay and, to my great distress, it sold for $3.00!! It just sat there and sat there with that low price and my heart sank when the auction ended.

Someone sure got a good deal on that coin.

...not buying a Haida Mask at $650. The following week it was going for way more than that. Not that I would have sold it but I missed out before the price jump and availability.

When I wrote the above last friday I was in a little bit of shock. In 2012 I had paid €1550.00 ( about US$2100.00) for a 1780 Maria Theresa thaler. The coin was the first example to surface in the market of the previously hypothesized true 1780( ie: not a re-strike) MTT. ON friday I went into one of Vienna's main auction houses( antiques fine art etc) they were selling a 1777 example that from the online photos has some interesting tooling matches with the coin this story is about. Well their expert ( a University numismatist) immediately expressed doubts about the coin. I didn't argue, I was wondering how I could have been such an idiot. to check further he then showed me a copy of an Auction catalog with the third, known to me, example of my coin and said this is the original. I of course then pointed out that I had purchased my coin from the same company. At this point he seemed to do a double take and then stated well that I should go and see HD Rauch he knows much more about these coins than he did ( he had previously explained, unnecessarily, that he had 30 years experience). I spent the weekend worrying about how I could have made such a mistake! Perhaps I had just wanted this coin to be real and so had blinded myself to this coin. However all weekend what nagged at me was how the coin matched ( down to tooling marks) 1777, 1778 and 1781 struck MTT. Today HD Rauch was in. He looked at the coin and immediately commented that it was genuine. He grabbed the standard references that I use...and then as he checked he became more and more interested in the coin. He even noticed something that I hadn't two of the earliest known re-strikes both have a distinct die crack( probably was on the Matrix/Hub. Based on that He stated that my coin had to have been struck earlier than those others. So this coin isn't be my most expensive mistake.....but it did give me me a huge fright! BTW it was never the money I was worried about....the fact I may have made such an error with that coin was the cause for considerable loss of sleep. All that said My next high price purchases will be scrutinized like never b4