64 Buffalo Nickels For 64 Dollars

Just got my 26-S in the mail from ebay. Spent $4.98 on it. It's kinda odd that even though that date has the lowest mintage of the series, it's not nearly as hard to find at a good price as some of the others. So here are my stats now:

59/64 coins found (92.1% complete)
$39.44 spent on 59 coins (66.8 cents per coin)
$24.56 left to spend on 5 coins ($4.91 budget per coin)

And now the final five coins needed:

1915
1915-S
1921-S
1924-D
1931-S

I have what is supposed to be a 15-P (couldn't tell from the pic, but it was at a great price) coming in the mail soon so will update when that one comes. I also have some bids in right now for the other 4 dates as well. I can see the finish line now!

I saw these the other day; I think this guy is dreaming a bit, but goes to show that finding coins for a project like yours does require time and patience.

@Rackster: Wow! That guy is REALLY dreaming if he thinks those coins are worth that. Other than just the really top key dates, you can get most restored date coins from the teens and 20s for 2 bucks or less on ebay.

It's definitely going a bit quicker than expected. I feel like I've been very fortunate with some of my sources for getting the coins. I was able to cherry pick almost 2/3 of the set from a guy at a local flea market who sells them for 60 cents a pop. And I got super lucky to pull the 13-S T2 from a dateless lot. That is the one that I expected to make this set take a long time to complete. Overall, it's looking like I should be able to wrap it up less than 2 months from when I started it, which is awesome.

As for the follow-up project of upgrading the set, that one will definitely take SEVERAL years. I would like a set in all VF-EF condition. The keys in those conditions run for several hundred dollars a coin, so that will be a long, slow journey. It's one I look forward to starting, though.

So as some of you may know, I am a bank teller. Well the other day, I got a 1937 Buffalo nickel in a deposit. This was a coin that I spent 62 cents for in my set. Well, I have decided to make an executive decision to count the one I found in circulation for my set, and I will sell the other one. So instead of 62 cents for that one, I got it for 5 cents.

So prior to this decision, I had a budget of $7.63/coin for my final two coins (15-s and 31-s). This extra 57 cents gives me a new budget of $7.91 per coin for the last two.

That brings me to a purchase I made tonight, a 31-s for 8 bucks even. That leaves me with $7.82 to spend on this project, with only the 15-S to go. One more coin and this thing will be done!

I've set up the framework for how I want to upgrade my set across the board afterI finish the cheap set. My original goal was to get every coin in VF-EF condition, but there are a couple of coins in there that will make that almost impossible to do unless I spend the rest of my life working on it.

So I decided to tweak it a bit, I will try to assemble a set of the best grade possible of each coin while spending no more than 100 bucks on any given coin. The only exception being the 13-s Type 2, which is impossible to find under 100 bucks with a readable date. I have determined that this will cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $3500 to complete the whole set. Still a very large number, but something I could theoreticlly do in ten years or so.

Since the later dates are all easily affordable all the way up to high MS grades, I will be setting a cap of low AU, no coins will be better that. The reasoning is to give the set a more uniform look.

Who knows if I will ever actually finish this or not, but I think it will be a fun challenge to at least try.

Got my 24-D in the mail today! Just 3 holes left! Still waiting on my 21-S and 31-S. And still trying to find a good deal on a 15-S.

Wow! Congradulations,