What Got You Into Coin Collecting?

mine was looking through my dad's money he collected from his paper route he did in the late 60's. Everyone at the time paid with coins so when he brought them home to count, I got to look through them when I was 4-5 and my mom got me a blue penny Whitman book to fill in.

my mom thought it was a good activity to do at the time. I guess I got hooked and haven't stopped.

This has been here in the past. Not sure how to find similar posts but yes it has been discussed before. However, since you asked, for me I just keep all the money I steal.

like carl says ,this has been discussed before. So make a long story short; If an older family member gives you a nice old coin when your in your childhood years you say wow that's cool ! there is a spark of interest that keeps growing and doesn't stop EVER !! congrats young child ,you are now a coin collector.

I started buying junk silver to stash and came across a couple old coins and got addicted.

Looking through my NRA magazine and decided to start buying silver coins...

Back when I was a kid, my country had just gone through a period of hyperinflation (and then a redenomination), and there was a lot of nearly worthless (and partly obsolete) coins lying around. One of my earliest memories, from about the age of 6 (just after the redenomination, when the old money was still accepted), involves counting out a large jar of assorted coinage - which came up to 1.5 new rubles (at the time, about a quarter dollar).

Then I found a really dirty coin on a tabletop, and recognized the design from an 1990s edition of a popular mathematical book from the 1930s - which mentioned coins as convenient objects with known dimensions, and gave pictures of early 1930s coins as examples (a footnote mentioned that, as of the early 1990s, one couldn't guess a coin's size by denomination anymore - a fact that was itself fascinating for a starting coin collector). The coin turned out to be a 20 kopek from 1932; it is still in my collection, the only coin I can confidently say I've had for more than fourteen years (though there are others that come close).
[Have I ever posted photos of that coin? Can't really remember. I certainly mentioned it many times earlier.]

I was hooked, and told as much to my father, who started to give me assorted foreign coins from what later turned out to be his own collection. I didn't really know what coin collecting involved at the time, and played with my coins much the way other kids would play with toy soldiers - losing many on the way. Many others, particularly of the "obsolete recent money" variety (which sadly included post-1961 Soviet coins), were given to places where I commonly played, and lost there (by then I had enough other toys, such as Lego minifigures, that I didn't need coins to stand in as characters, so they started to stand in as money, in elaborate systems roughly corresponding to actual redenomination equivalents).

At some point, I figured out that coins from the late 1990s are becoming very rare in circulation (except for the higher denominations), and tried to assemble a full date set (this goal, even discounting the several famous rare dates, was not fully formalized until 2008, and not fully finished until 2012, the last coin needed being a 1 kopek from 1999; even now, as far as I can tell, I still don't have a full date and mint set - even, again, discounting very rare dates - but by now I'm not sure which ones exactly I'm missing either).

Then, at some point in what might have been 2008 or early 2009 (perhaps at some point I'll find some source that will help me date it better), I met a guy on a street who was selling old coins. I don't think I quite realized by then that coins can be bought; so I got a few coins from him at what later turned out to be inflated prices, and was really happy.
I'm very unsure of my 2009-2011 coin collecting chronology; but in March 2011, I won an essay contest that I entered at the last moment and never expected to do well in, and spend the winnings on assorted coins (including most of my silver - ironically during the brief period when silver prices were around their top). I found CCF not long later, registered in February 2012 (can't recall why, but most likely I just figured out I was going to register at some point anyway, and didn't want to miss the nice date), and, well, as they say, the rest is history.

As has been posted, we have heard from the older members, in older posts.
But it is interesting hearing how the new members got started.

For me I am not sure, I feel it was a past life, that I don't have
Total recall about.

I once saw an ike in a skill claw game, won it for $0.50. I didn't really get any other coins else, because I was ten, but I did keep a bicentennial quarter, a half dollar, and a sac. dollar. We were sorting out change that we had collected for 2 years, and I remembered something that my dad had briefly mentioned about old coins. I only found like 3 LWCs, and then I was hooked. I didn't look very hard and probably missed some silver, buffs, etc.