1901-S Barber Half Dollar

Nice detail. I can only wonder if I will look that good when I am 117 years old.

F15..

Not sure if I would have bought it for $135.

The reason I would not pick it up at that price is because it's a details coin . Cleaned .

Cleaning significantly reduces the value on Barbers, especially the halves, since such a large percentage of them have been cleaned.

Uncleaned examples are the scarce coins everyone wants and they pay great prices for them.

Cleaned Barbers cut out a lot of buyers who have no interest in "bargain" prices.

The reason it was cheap is because it has been cleaned, but market acceptable IMO. Everyone wants original examples rather than cleaned ones even if they are market acceptable. People will pay large amounts for Barber coins with original surfaces because there are so few. Most are cleaned harshly, or have a market acceptable cleaning.

You certainly have every right to collect exactly as it makes you happy. I, and others, offer suggestions on what we do, which you may or may not find suitable for yourself.

But on the subject of 1901-S Barber half dollars, there are over 200 of them on ebay right now. There is a beautiful original NGC F-12 for $10 dollars more than you paid - $145.00, as one example.

With the money you do show that you spend I would much rather have fewer coins and nicer examples. Buying 20-30, or more, coins per month gets the juices flowing when you get to unwrap new coins almost every day. I'm thinking most of us did that in our beginning purchases (especially when ebay actually had auctions). At least I did.

But for me, I've come to the point where I only buy coins that I absolutely love. Coins that I will always feel bad about if I missed them. As long as they are within a fair market range, or sometimes even over. Some coins really are very difficult or impossible to replace, as you well know.

So when I see the amounts you pay each time you show us a new coin, and you are rightly proud of most of those purchases, I still feel like I'd love to see you take a months worth of spending on a single killer coin. If you do it a couple of times, you won't need to open packages too often to enjoy your collection. It becomes less about the arrival of the coins, and more about the hunt for beautiful metal.

I was curious about the NGC f12 coin selling for $145 and I decided to check it out. It is overgraded. That coin only had one letter in LIBERTY complete - the L. Most of the letters are missing. The coin in this thread has almost the entire LIBERTY lettering visible with just tbe R incomplete, maybe the B although it shows nicely. I think that NGC coin is vg10.

There were 3 other f12 stabbed coins. One was an NGC coin selling for ~$168. That one had no letters in LIBERTY legible. There was a PCGS coin selling for $275 which was wiped with hairlines in the fields. The other PCGS f12 was nice and priced right at $255.

Scarce doesn't mean rare. A 1909-S VDB Lincoln is scarce but you can find hundreds of them for sale on ebay. Certainly there are more of those around than 1901-S Barber halves.

These days, coins don't have to be expensive for me to like them.