Newish Member With A Passion For ASEs

Hi all, I've been posting up a little about Silver Eagles, which is my main focus of collecting lately.
I've been on and off collecting since the 70s.
My dad ran a gas station, and my mom would have my younger brother and I sifting through the change, mainly picking out wheat cents and looking for silver. She got the silver, we got the wheaties. We both had a pretty complete set, then found out too late we had a nephew picking them out and spending them on us! After they were about complete except I don't think either of us found any VDBs.

I did lose interest until I guess my 30s, although I always was on the lookout for any silver in my hand.
Well wait to back up a bit, I did develop an interest in Franklin halfs for some reason and got a full set of those in a Capitol holder, and also put together a nice 20th Century set also in a Capitol holder that I'm very proud of. Plus it's a slightly older holder which doesn't have the 1999 Statehood Quarters, and I am glad it doesn't, better looking.
Wedding day 10/1/1994, my oldest sister gave us a nice 1994 Bullion ASE which I still have.
I can't say this really sparked an immediate interest in ASEs, but she knew I did like coins and I'd hold on to it and appreciate it.
It was some years after that I continued to work on my 20th Century set (I'd had the empty Capitol holder for some time and a good deal of the coins, none of which I had put in). So I finished that and felt good about it, this had to be about the late 2000s, early 2010s.
It got to be in the mid 2010s that I started noticing silver was notably low and for whatever reason decided to start stacking junk silver and decided to have ASEs in the mix. Started buying them (wisely or unwisely, to this day I am unsure) from JM Bullion. At that time you almost "had" to buy $100 worth but the shiiping was free. Fun times, I remember first buying 4 to get to the $100 mark and later I had to buy 5 because the price was so low on them! Hog heaven!
But I was also buying them loose and some graded ones, no real direction.
So I don't know what exactly it was that made me decide to start being an actual collector vs being a stacker, but I was definitely "falling hard" for ASEs. I did find a list on a website. I can't remember the site right now, but it listed basically the individual ASEs listed per year per type. Some of these of course were only in particular sets, you guys probably know that. So I started researching ASE sets and sets with ASEs in them. So it didn't really take too long for this to turn into a passion of collecting all the sets as well as all the individual issued coins.
I started getting so in to the OGP aspect that I got turned off by slabbed coins in general and started selling off anything slabbed and using it to buy OGP sets and coins.
I had also collected some gold coins along the way and started turning them into cash for ASEs. The big turning point is when I mentioned to an LCS that I deal with that I was thinking on taking a leap and getting the 10th Anniversary set, or at least a 1995W. He had a lead or two that he wanted to check out and he did come up with a set for me. His intent was to sell me the ASE and keep the gold, but had no reserves about having me buy the whole set.
Soon after that I discovered more sets and kept going after them. Soon I was selling off other things of value that I had in pursuit of ASEs. The wife doens't mind too much as the coins take up a lot less space than the stuff I was selling. Although she is a little distressed about my lack of an exit strategy with all this and says if I get greased and leave behind all these coins, she's buying groceries with them at the Piggly Wiggly.
So I've probably turned in to a bit of a know-it-all about ASEs. Many people have siad I have sets they have never heard of and I have a collection that probably less than 10 people would have accumulated. I will start going through the collection soon on the forum.