How Would Your Collecting Change If You Won The Lottery?

My personal thrill is in the hunt. Cherrypicking, and finding things that are undervalued. Paying $7 for an item worth $12, and $70 for an item worth $150. At the level of millionaires, I don't know if this exists, and for that reason I'm out.

I'm not sure how my collecting habit would change but I'd sure like to find out!

I would buy out JustCarl's full split band Mercury dime sets . I believe it's up to 11 sets now .

I'd stop buying cheap coins to fill my 7070 with!

I'd probably go for a California gold slug or $50 gold piece. The price on those has gone through the roof over the last 5 or 6 years for two reasons. First the prices have increased. Second, "grade-flation" has made all of the pieces with banged-up rims into choice AUs. When you see a piece that is half way decent it gets called "Mint State" and the dealer wants $200,000+ for it.

Some of those dealers, who market slugs, really have an attitude. One of them had the nerve to give me that "You can't afford that 'look'" when I asked for a quote one time. I learned long ago as a collector and as a dealer, "Never judge a book by it's cover." Some of the guys who look like they don't have money have more money that you could ever imagine.

You know, basically, it probably wouldn't change much. I was buying a lot of coins from bargain bins, and I will be buying a lot of of coins from bargain bins.
Just more coins, and higher-end bargain bins (and no more cases like this Tuesday when I pick out 200 coins from a really good bin and have to choose 60 because I can't afford more)... and maybe I'll start treating some albums as bargain bins (to an extent I already was).

I got my lesson on big purchases six years ago, when I got a big prize (not that big, about $350) in what might as well have been a lottery for my effort in it*, and spent almost all of it on silver for the low low under-melt price of $45 per ounce.
But of course if I have a lot more than $350 I can probably look at the sort of coins I bought then and think of them as bargain finds. Come to think of it there probably really are $50 bargain bins out there somewhere (and gold melt bins, for that matter... though I can't recall ever actually seeing any silver melt bins either**).

Basically what BigSilver said. I really seem to be in it for the thrill - paying 7 cents for an item worth 15 cents, paying 70 cents for an item worth $2. More often than not, the gains (if any) are overshadowed by the price of a Coke bottle that I buy on the way back, but I don't really care anyway.
With more money, I could get it up to paying $70 for an item worth $120, or, who knows, even paying $700 for an item worth $1100. Maybe even a bit higher.
I don't like auctions - mostly because such estimations are not really possible there, since auction prices depend on whether the 2-3 most interested buyers happen to be in audience more than anything else - so the really high end stuff will probably pass me by anyway.

That said, a few of my long-term goals - some type sets, the country count, the quest for a coin from every year from 1517 to 2018*** - suddenly become way easier.
Maybe I'd actually start on that formerly-theoretical quest of getting a coin from every year from 1 AD to the present, and find out whether that's actually possible directly.

[EDIT: fixed some minor typos]



*) it was an essay contest, which I found out about like 20 minutes before closing - quickly slapped something together in the next 15 minutes, sent it literally in the last moment, ended up getting second prize

**) aside from that one place with random Abbasid dirham fragments for the equivalent of $37 per ounce

***) I'm not actually sure of the exact boundaries, but as my oldest and newest AD dated coins right now, and having exactly 500 other years between them, 1517 and 2018 make for nice bookends

My set of $4 Stellas would greatly improve.