Transportation Of A Collection

I agree with the do-it-yourself crowd. When I have moved I have always personally moved my collections and items of high value. If I had to overnight somewhere, the goods came into the hotel/motel room with me.

In such cases it's extremely good to be paranoid.

I think paxbrit gave a great description. What I did when moving abroad was just that:

- pack the coin collection as regular as you can. Do not use anything that make people believe that it may contain anything valuable.
- the real valuable coins I kept with me all the time, just as with my valuable papers. In a backpacker's backpack, if I remember well. That offers a lot of space and quite some straps to untie before you actually have it. And such backpacks are not uncommon to see for budget travelers at hotels. Just don't check in at a 5 star resort, where it draws a lot of attention.
- lock the door to your hotel room and use all the locks. Make sure all windows are locked, too, but don't do anything to look suspicious or draws attention to you.
- act casual. Keep calm and carry on.

Things not to do:

- give your coin collection or valuables to a third party, no matter how 'experienced' or' well insured' they are.
- label your coin collection as something precious or vulnerable. Keep it with you all the time.
- put your coin collection on top of a moving box. Just put some books or manuals or administration on top of it, just something boring that also weighs a bit.
- tell anyone what you're transporting. No one needs to know
- act suspicious. The last you want is drawing attention to yourself.
- use the hotel safe. Usually hotels have a 'backdoor' to open the safe in case a guest screws up. Also, if you're not used to use such a device, it's easy to forget that you put something in it, especially during a stressful time as moving is. My experience is that hotel staff doesn't see, hear or finds anything in your room if you call them later on to inquire.




I fly a lot and I fly at a lot of different places. I can tell you what's going on now after 9/11.

First, do keep in mind that drawing any attention to yourself is not a smart idea. Act as common as you can. The TSA and equivalent in other countries will stop you anyway if you have a lot of coins, even if you just have a lot of small change in your wallet (which happened to me a few times. I guess it's one of the drawbacks of always having at least three currencies with you). It's actually better to be a bit pro-active and ask before the scanner if you should take out your coins, as you have a few of them. That creates a bit of sympathy, as you are cooperating.

Now here's the twist. People of the TSA and equivalent are 'just dumb muscle' hired to do a trick and repeat it hundreds of times a day to give people a feeling of safety when boarding aircraft. They don't know anything about actual hand luggage rules (as they differ per airline and per booking class) and they know even less about valuables, as they are simply not trained as customs officials. They just know that metal is suspicious and needs to be double checked. So, pack your coins in an accessible way, don't use any expensive storage methods and don't create a lot of fuzz about it. Keep it relaxed and transparent.

This way I got about one pound of silver coins, worth about $800 or so in market value, through airport security a few months back. Just show the coins, make some comment on how you like coin collecting and don't pack them in an expensive or inaccessible way. The TSA equivalent wasn't particularly interested in the coins and didn't even notice that it was silver. I had put them in blank flips and then in one of those transparent bags and just walked along with them.

In addition, I also once had a 5 kg bag of coins (about 10 pounds), about one year ago or so, with a lot of different ones. Same principle here: make sure they can easily see and access all coins, make sure to act as casual as it gets, just tell them you like to collect coins and you should be good. in this case it was an unsorted batch of junk coins which I got hold of for a tiny price. It didn't cause any trouble at all.

The only time I almost got in trouble was when leaving Iraq, where the local TSA thought that 60 year old coins also would be part of 'ancient artifacts', which are indeed prohibited to be exported without a license. Fortunately, the supervisor knew better.