Common, Readily Available & Cheap Coins When You Were Younger That Are Eye-Poppingly Expensive Today

I can't think of anything eye popping for me personally but in the early 70s it was common to find BU Franklins for these prices. Of course everything else has gone up 20x since then.



I did pull a couple worn Franklins out of the cash register during that period, those were still circulating a little at face. Never any dollar coins. Some Mercury dimes. A really beat up Barber dime even showed up once. Of course you can look at any guide book from the early 60s and see some eye-popping prices.

The local coin / gold shop when I was a kid (say 35 years ago) had a box labeled "10x face"

Everything in the box (mostly circulated pre-1964 coins, culls, etc) was priced at 10 times its face value, but sometimes you could find some higher grade things in the mix if you looked carefully. Of course, since it was silver only, the smallest denomination was a dime. You weren't going to find key dates, of course, just common dates.

I acquired quite a few beat-up, well-worn or cull Liberty Seated dimes for $1 each, same for some better looking Barber dimes and even a few XF-AU Mercury dimes.

Quarters were $2.50, halves $5.00, silver dollars $10.00 each. You never saw any Bust coins in there, but for halves, Walkers and Franklins were well-represented, along with the Barber coins. There were plenty of beat-up Morgans and Peace dollars to look through, but I couldn't usually afford that on my $5 a week chores allowance, and besides, that money was saved for the arcade...

This is also how I acquired my first ever 3 cent nickel for $0.30 when it accidentally got tossed in the box.

None of those are eye-poppingly expensive, though.

I remember going to coin shows with my dad and seeing rolls of Uncirculated common date Morgans for what I thought was the crazy price of $350 per roll, or $400/roll for better dates. I think most of them were 1883-O, 1884-O, 1886, and 1887 rolls if I remember. I have an 1883-O I bought from one of those rolls.

I think if you go back to my dad's generation (born 1948) you could have made a killing buying things like Indian Head cents, large cents, high grade Liberty Seated and Barber coinage, pretty much anything really. Dad was working at a service station in New Mexico while in high school in the mid 60s and used to still get silver in change but it was already disappearing -- he had a Barber dime, a dateless SLQ, a few silver Washingtons and Roosevelts, and 2 1921 Morgan dollars that he won for something or other.

I inherited about 20 fairly worn Morgan dollars from my grandma when she passed away in 2003. Prior to her passing, she used to tell me that when her and my grandpa would go to Nevada casinos in the late 50s, Morgan and Peace dollars were still being used at face value. I wonder how many of those were CC's? If she had bought and saved, say, 50 rolls for face value, that would definitely have been a great investment. Of course, 50 rolls of silver dollars in the 1950s would have been a very significant sum of money!

I remember being able to buy nice problem free circulated copper coins for good prices, too -- in Arkansas, near Springdale, we stopped at a coin shop that had a box of common date coronet and braided large cents for $10 each, most of which were problem-free original F-VF coins. Indian Head cents of every date except 1877 and before were $1 each; there was also a box of AU-Unc late date Indians, but I forget the price (probably $3-$5 each.) I also bought a 1868 Shield nickel there for $3.75, decent original VG.

A bit later on in life, another coin shop I used to visit while in college had a full box of probably 200-300 late Roman bronzes and provincial coins, unidentified, but mostly recognizable , $10 for 10. I scored some great deals there on raw coins. A 1950-D nickel I bought there for $7.50 is now in a NGC MS66 5FS holder. A 1948-S Washington quarter (I forget what I paid for it, maybe $8 or $9) graded out NGC MS67, and a nice, lightly toned1943-D silver Jefferson War Nickel I bought raw is now in a PCGS MS66 holder.
Not huge "wins" but certainly worth a lot more than I paid for them.

When ever we have one of these we wax nostalgic but we always fail to take into consideration the inflation adjusted value of money and also the time value of money.

When we moved to the US in 1977 circulated Mercury dimes were a dollar and minimum wage was ~$3 an hour, I could work an hour and get 3 Mercury dimes, today with minimum wage being $15 an hour I can get 7 Mercury dimes. Just saying what was cheap 40-50 years ago may actually be cheaper today.

CC gold over the last 25 years. It was never cheap, but it was not outlandishly expensive.

In 2019 the Enhanced Reverse Proof was $65. Today they are worth $1000

What caused the huge jump in value on the ASE?

So basically just an intentionally underpriced ASE where supply was so restricted that demand massively exceeded it. If the Mint had run a Dutch auction, those coins would never have sold for $70 in the first place. It's like selling World Series tickets via lottery, the tickets are instantly resellable for multiples of the original payment.

Essentially just a giant publicity stunt.