How Do You Decide What To Collect?

Toned coins and investment grade U.S. currency. I always found collecting by filling holes in an album to be quite monotonous and repetitive.

So I suppose I collect what catches my eye (i.e. toned coins)

Well I only collect ZAR and Morgandollars
And only graded Ms I have my eye on a CC Morganbut wow I will have to save 10 years to even get close!
But ANY condition morgandollar iis awesome.
but to try and keep away from fakes I get graded if I can afford it.
American coins are the most beautiful!

Approaching this from my OCD, How do you decide what not to collect?

My parents would make me leave stuff behind - in the garage - when we moved. Intra-city was OK, I could go back with my bike and grab the best goodies. But when we moved to Arizona I think I learned about anxiety attacks.

Although I've got a half dozen, I don't collect insulators. nope,nope,nope. And old car parts, especially used brake shoes.

Quit laughing, I'm serious!

My rule of thumb: just choose something that actually has your interest or something that you have affinity with.

First of all, I'm a type collector (although I keep 'special' dates aside). I don't care if a coin is from 1899 or 1898 if it's the same coin, really. Unless 1898 just had 61 pieces and 1899 500.000 pieces, of course.

In my case, that's Norwegian and Dutch coins, as I have lived in both countries. I have decided to limit myself to kroner and gulden, as that's already quite a challenge to collect, especially with the commemorative coins and the specials issues. When I'm done, I might continue with something else (Dutch Euro coins or maybe the guldens from before 1817. Norway had the speciedaler and several variants before the kroner came in 1874). I purely collect coin types, as that's already quite an effort: a lot of coins have just one year with mintage and some are even limited to just 10.000 pieces or so. Plus that there's a lot of different gold coins for both countries...

I also do collect sets of circulation coins from the countries I visited. This is usually the only souvenir I take home with me. I think it's very much fun to see how coins look around the world and to see the major differences in approach to a currency.

As if this isn't enough, I do collect some British, American and German pieces (especially Notgeld is very interesting), but this is more or less on the sideline and has more to do with me visiting those countries quite often. I recently found out that I do possess quite a few ECU tokens and that no one really seems to know anything about it. As such, I decided to start 'collecting' them and find out more about it. If there's a good story in it, I might just write it down and get it published.

First and formost collect what you like.

Second dont get hung up on the 'how' to collect

third DO NOT make it a job. Keep it enjoyable

I did not really make a conscious decision, when I started collecting, to collect some particular thing. It just happened that way.

I found myself drawn to world type collecting because there was so much variety, and the collection could grow at minimum cost.

Others have different things that attract them.

I suppose that if you really want to get a complete "set" of whatever you collect, you should count the cost of the complete collection and decide if this is for you.

I collect whatever catches my whim. I just finished watching Wolf Hall and I absolutely had to have a Henry VIII coin.

I was a history major in college and always had a fascination with currency and coins from the times I studied - civil war, Rome, prohibition, WWII years and those special coin materials, etc.

I also like to collect family birthdate sets. Mine is 1980 and it's less than exciting because no silver coins were issued but hey it's special to me.