Sorting By Date, What Do You Use?

Cheap plastic containers from Walmart. Having the lids allows for sorting and stacking (to save space) when spreading the sort over several days/events.

I use 2x2 coin envelopes in conjunction with color-coded 2x2x5 coin boxes for both sorting and storage.

Well, since everyone else is going with wally world, I'll put my 2 cents in for Costco, I use cashew containers, the lids stack together snugly so you can have a tower of nickels.

I also open the rolls carefully so I can reuse them for each year.

Sorry no pic of the lids stacked but you get the idea

brenpickle, I am so trying your idea! Thank you all.

If this helps, I acquired a brand-new Emplast brand storage container(like the nuts/bolts type)with 48 drawers wrapped in the original plastic when I helped someone clean a garage. It's great for sorting a large amount of mixed coins quickly. I went to the store and bought a small box of the round blank stickers like you would use for garage sale pricing. Labeled those and stuck to the fronts of the plastic drawers. I wish I could find dividers to fit the drawers, but this works very well for me.

The best part is you can pull off and change the labels as your collecting needs change. I have labels for 1950s nickels, 1960s cents, misc. odds, etc. Every day I sort the house change and when time allows go through it in more detail.

For coins I want to keep longer, I have the plastic fishing tackle/craft boxes. I keep the coins in plastic sandwich bags with another label like the one on the sorting box. I have found it's easier to get the coins in and out of the plastic boxes if they're in a bag, plus you can see which year they are without having to stick the labels to the box.

Tackle/craft boxes are cheap and sometimes you can find real bargains on them at yard sales/ thrift stores.

I think that myself and others have found that sorting by date is both time consuming and a cumbersome process.

Take quarters: If you're sorting them first by type, old style, state, and ATB, then by date into first decade then by year and then mintmark. If I'm really obsessive by condition. Before I know it I could have some major money tied up in this whole process. The value of the money tied up in this process increases or decreases expotentally with the value of the coin being searched. Not to say anything about the space you need to do this. As you add more types to this process pretty soon your home becomes a bank vault with tables filled with nothing but coins and you're eating your meals at the coffee table.

At some point you decide to limit this obsession (most likely when the wife gets unhappy with all the coins lying around the house. Then you settle on just one coin but which one to go for and then you stew about this decision. The more you stew the more you become Joe Schmlysckykly (the little guy who paces around with a rain cloud over his head because of the weight of the decisions he has to make but can't.

So I've decided to do it the easy way. When I go to the bank to get my dimes I've found that, I can get rolls of coin by year. When I get these I save them (no fuss, no muss, no time consuming process). It really easy this way. Somebody else does all the heavy lifting. Sure its just the current year but eventually I'll get all the years, and then if I feel like it I can break them out into the various mintmarks. Expand this to other denominations and I have this obsession licked.

I mainly roll search to fill my circulation sets and keep the excess good older coins into coin rolls immediately. I guess I'm just have a lazy outlook on this process.

I use boxes that are designed to sort baseball cards. They work dreamt!

I use red SOLO cups. I just have to be careful not to toss a coin into the one containing my beer.