Switching To Low-Budget Collecting In A Declining Economy

I am using this time of tight money to focus my collection. I have been selling most of my lower grade coins and using a small portion of the proceeds to buy a select few higher grade coins. It keeps me engaged and still learning about coins even as I take money out of my collection.

I also have been developing a couple of lower budget series that still reflect my new interest in higher grade, more focused collecting. Ikes, World War II nickels, and a few foreign series are the coins that I have been focusing on lately.

I really don't see any problems here. There are numerous ways to continue collecting coins.
1. Rob a bank for all coins. Look through them, donate the rest to the Salvation Army and take a tax right off.
2. Visit lots of people and check behind the cusions of their furniture for coins.
3. Adopt a lot of kids, put them all to work so you can make more money to buy more coins.
4. Rob a coin store.
5. Stop collecting coins and switch to Beanie Babies. Now at a rock bottom price range.

Not at all. I was poor to begin with.

Zeewool, you must live in a different country. In my country, my local and national governments have been pretty lucid about the very bad economic situation--our state has done an incredible job of belt-tightening in fact.

Over here, it's the radicals who are distorting everything in order to restore a conservative oligarchy to power (you see they feel threatened by efforts to support the middle and working-classes in my country, including letting tax cuts for the super-rich expire).
There's even a bunch of nutters who are paid by millionaires to make bogus claims in the media 24/7, it's really unfortunate. (Some of my compatriots have short memories.)

I sincerely hope things get better for both our countries, but I'm guessing you and I both have become cynics.

-SCS

I'm not cynical SCS, but I can be very sarcastic with a smile on my face at times. (There really is a difference). I know that times are tough for a lot of folks right now, and I seem to have temporarily misplaced my rose colored glasses.

There are lots of ways to still collect even on a tight budget.
1. Don't insist on top grade wonder coins. Nice XF and AU coins are very attractive and cost a fraction of the MS-whatever coins.
2. Foreign coins are very cheap compared to US. You can build a large collection in high grade out of dealers junk boxes or poundage. Collect the world by type if you want and there are thousands of coins you can add to your collection for a few dollars each.
3. Switch to a cheaper series Jefferson nickels, Roosevelt dimes, Franklin halves can be nice to collect and affordable even in MS as long as you stay away from the Full Step, Full Torch, and Full Bell lines nonsense. If the Franklins are too high in MS then go for AU (See #1)
4. Consider tokens, Civil War tokens are still affordable in XF to AU and you can build a very large collection. You could probably spend the rest of your life collecting them. Other possibilities are sales tax tokens, ration tokens, or another choice for a long lasting large collection would be coal scrip.
5. Then there are world tokens as well. Canadian as a lot of pre-confederation tokens, Britain has the 18th century Conder tokens, and the 19th century 1811 to 1820 period tokens. These tokens are very reasonable, but the books can be costly. Germany has the municipal notgeld tokens of the 1916 to 1922 period Over 600 issuers and over 2000 different pieces. Some are costly but a lot of them can be purchased for under $10 each. The problem is finding them.

I still find a lot of good stuff searching bank rolls. Cents and nickels are fun and errors and varieties abound. You don't need to buy boxes,just get $10 worth of rolls and keep the good stuff and recycle the rest. It's cheap fun and there are still treasures out there(I got a full roll of steel pennies just last week).

Oddly enough your not far from the truth. Recently on PBS TV they have been running a story about the great depression of 1929. One of the items noted was how the newsmedia manipulated the economy and the stock market. Reporters were paid to say a stock was a fantastic investment so those that did the paying could just wait for the reactions of people running out to buy and then they'ld sell.
Things are really not that much different to day. Our newmedia blasts how bad the economy is and people run out and pull money out of the stock market again. They stop buying new cars. They stop going on vacations. They stop spening on hobbies such as coin collecting so the prices of coins drops just as stocks in the stock market.
Not sure about where you live but out of all the Weather stations around me their predictions of not only tomorrow are usually wrong, but in many instances they are wrong about what is going on even now. For example a little while ago several stations showed our area covered with clouds. I look outside and get blinded by the Sun.
If you go by our news media for coin collecting they would probably say Beanie Babies are a better investment.
UNFORTUATELY the greater quantity of people that watch such garbage on TV or the Radio think it's real. If YOU do, buy a book called 1984.