How To Know If You Should Get Your Coins Graded

Whoa, ONE coin per thread, please! It's not too late to take a few of these coins out and put them elsewhere. Especially the Walking Half (it belongs in a whole different section).

Deciding to send coins to be graded depends on the value of the coin and which of the grading services to use. In very general terms, the fee for grading is going to cost you $50-$65. To make your grading service "investment" worth the effort, again in very general terms, you want the final value (taking in account the fees and your coin's cost cost) to be about $150 or more, otherwise you are losing money if/when you sell your coin. Make sense? For example, if I have a coin that I bought $25, and I send it in to be graded and that costs me $60... I have a total of $85 "invested" in this venture, but I need to sell the coin but similar graded coins sell for $35, well, I've lost money.

Should YOU send a coin in to be graded? Only if it's a high dollar coin, otherwise you're going to lose money if/when you sell it.

Go look at ebay sold items for a reference. 1954-D cents that are already slabbed/graded by PCGS or NGC at MS66RD can be bought for around 20$ - surely not one you would want to send in yourself unless it is a spectacular example.

As others have stated, and I said above, the coins you should have graded are the coins of value that are worthy of spending the fees on.

For example... your cent above... as Rothery above has mentioned, you can buy 1954-D cents already GRADED for about $20. Well, if you paid $50 for the fees for your coin to be graded, and afterwards when you sold it for $20, you just lost $30. Would grading your coin be worth it? Obviously not. Are your other coins worth getting third party graded? Many here would say that unless your raw coin has a value of at least $150, then no, your net result is not worth the cost of having it graded.

Now, if you have a coin that is special to you and you plan on never selling it, go for it! No one is stopping you from having any coin graded, as long as you can pay the grading fees.

You can look for yourself at ebay's SOLD listings to find coins similar to yours that are already graded and see what exactly they sold for. That's a fairly good indictor of value.

Your Walker half dollar can be posted in the "Classic" coin section and didn't belong here in the "Modern" section. I'd suggest you post your coins (signally) in CCF's "Grading" section to see what members think your coins would grade as, then look them up on ebay, both slabbed and unstabbed and make your own decisions from there. In fact, you might be better off buying coins already graded to perhaps grab a bargain off ebay!

Bonne chance!

Thank you for your kind words, but one correction, please... I am not a "guy" I might fit in as "one of the guys" but alas, I'm not one. It was my pleasure to help you out!

I have been looking over some of my coins and was considering having them graded and I want to thank everyone for the post and comments. This has helped me so much.
This is a really good community and everyone is so helpful

I'll do a little math here since I have the PCGS grading sheet in front of me. I just paid a couple dollars over $1000 to have 16 coins graded, which is outrageous, so let's see what it would cost to grade a single coin. A variety of course, as that is what this forum is about.

My example will be a 1944 D/D RPM-002 FS-502 in what you hope is will come in at MS-65 and in the end be worth about $100.

You cherrypicked the coin off ebay for $5
PCGS Economy Service Level Grading fee: $22
PCGS Variety Attribution fee: $18
Gold Shield Service Group fee: $5 (this is optional but gets you photos of the coin and more)
Handling fee: $10
Return Shipping fee: $22
Outgoing Shipping fee: $5

So,

Original cost of the coin: $5
Total PCGS and Shipping investment to slab one coin by itself in a submission: $82

Total cost for the coin in a slab: $87
Expected new value of the coin in the slab: $100

You now have $13 additional value, but assuming you could have sold the coin RAW for at least $18 you lost money. Not including if you sell it on ebay then you lose a ton more money in their fees on the back end.

This does not include the annual $69 "Collector's Club" fee that is mandatory to be allowed to submit coins directly.

To wrap this up, let's assume you paid the mandatory club fee, so you've spent a total of $156 to slab the coin. You sell it on ebay for $100 plus $5 shipping. They charge roughly 12% including on the shipping, so they will take about $12.50 from the sale price leaving you with $92.50 cash in hand.

You end up with no coin and $92.50 after having spent $156 so total loss is $63.50 (not including the money you could have made just selling it RAW in the first place).
Buyer ends up having the coin and is out $105 with a coin that is worth $100.

Shows why it is almost always better to buy a coin already slabbed than try and do it yourself.