My Silver Dollar Collection ....... If You're Wondering Why?

It is fun to bid/win on ebay but not very often do you get a deal. I *won* a few on there but I rarely paid more than melt unless it is nice and in an PCGS or NGC slab. I still buy on there but when they hit book value, I don't care how they look, I pass and look for others to mess with, er, buy. When I started, I bought coins in the shape you have been showing but only to fill holes in my albums. Posting pics on here, grading mine was a nice learning experience. I have since been upgrading those melt coins with nice coins but.... it sure has been spendy... LOL. Good luck and have fun, just don't get carried away and get taken.

Sounds like your having fun . But with $7,500 of found money I would have went with quality over quantity . It's not how many you have that makes for a real nice collection . but it's the bragging rites of owning a few MS-67 Gem Morgan's .Don't get caught going down the wrong road as some of us did in our collecting years .

The flip side of T-BOP's comment is that sometimes your goal is to complete or mostly complete a series and that's pretty tough in high grades sometimes. So while one person might get joy from saying here's my 5 MS-67 Morgan's, another might want an album full of them.

Bottom line, if you are enjoying what you are collecting, that's the most important thing. ebay has always been good for me but I am always careful that I know what pricing should be on each coin I am biddding realizing you win some and lose some. Don't let yourself get caught in a bidding war!

I do appreciate the concern and advice you've given me about not getting carried away and getting myself into bidding wars at ebay. But that's for foolish young people ..... I'm a shrewd old fart.

When I first started collecting silver dollars I paid too much for some, but never too too much, and not because of bidding wars but because I hadn't educated myself enough about values and condition yet, so I did pay more than I should have early on. In my database I keep on all my silver dollars, of the 250+ I own, (and I say + because there are some I haven't catalogued yet), only 13 were won with bids over $35, and most under $30. Many even in the low $20's and quite a few in the teens. I am a very frugal bidder, and I almost always only make one bid per auction. First I check PCGS for values, then I check past ebay auction prices on that particular coin and grade to see what recent past sales have been, and only then I place one bid that I believe is a good and bargain price for the coin, and I place that bid in the last few seconds of the auction. If I am outbid, so be it, there's a thousand more later that day, but I never place a second bid.

As to the reasons for collecting at all. I see that T-Bop and Greasy Fingers think it is quality that matters, KenKat and hfjacinto like to fill sets. For me it's not so much the best silver dollar because I really don't like to "pay up", I guess I'm cheap, but I do enjoy it when I get a real winner for cheap, and completing sets has never been my goal either, but quantity does seem to make me happy, and when I occasionally get a real beauty for small change, well that's just frosting on the cake. I encapsulate each Dollar in those plastic SnapLock cases, I number and grade each and enter them in my database (like in my image), bundle them with rubber bands in stacks of 10 and put them in a safe. So I have 25 stacks now and a few loose. That makes me smile, and that's my coin collecting fun.