Collecting Coins What Are The Types And Pricing

Collecting Coins: What Are The Types And Pricing?

Summary: Mints often come up with coins, medals and tokens that go on to become collector items. Commemorative coins are very common, like coins for the Olympics or some other historically significant event like the landing on the moon by Apollo. A collectible coin has to be examined by the dealer before it can be assigned a price tag. The first examination will place the coin in the category of either denomination or type.

These coins come in various denominations like half cent c...

coin, collectibles, collecting coins

Article Body: Mints often come up with coins, medals and tokens that go on to become collector items. Commemorative coins are very common, like coins for the Olympics or some other historically significant event like the landing on the moon by Apollo. A collectible coin has to be examined by the dealer before it can be assigned a price tag. The first examination will place the coin in the category of either denomination or type.

These coins come in various denominations like half cent coins, seated quarters, large sized cents, three cent nickels etc. Most collectors like to collect sets but since sets can prove steep on the pocket they settle for at least one of each type. Some of the more common types are silver dollars, dimes, nickels, the rare half dollar, cents and quarters.

Silver dollars would be priced more than the denomination it carries because of the silver content in it. Common among these are the Morgans which were minted from to and the Peace Dollar which made an appearance in to , considered the perfect addition to a collectors existing set.

The dimes started off in as % silver and % copper but the silver content began to drop and in the value was debased. The dime now became % copper and % of nickel as these were not precious metals. The older dimes are naturally worth a lot more than their successors. Amateur collectors do manage to find the Barber Dime that was minted to and the Mercury Dime minted to , which are now rare items.

By definition a nickel is /th of a dollar and is often made of an alloy of nickel and copper. Famous nickels are the Liberty Head V minted to and here a truly authentic is very rare and valuable and has many counterfeits to its name. Then to saw the arrival of the buffalo nickel. During World War II the nickels minted were generally of a composite of metals like silver, manganese and copper.

Among the increasingly rare coins one notices that the - Franklin Half Dollar is considered a real find despite being fairly recent. Along with this, quarters are even more difficult to find like the Standing Liberty minted to , which is quite sought after and the Barber minted to , is even more so. Cents have their own place in the coin collectors album. They have been minted since and now come under different collectible categories. The Flying Eagle Cent minted to , the Indian Head Cent minted to and the Wheat Black Lincoln Cent minted to are some of the coins sought after by collectors.

Under specialty categories, one generally finds foreign coins which are no longer in circulation and of a decent age. This would include the gold coins minted before like the Gold Dollars minted to and the Double Eagles, also known as the twenty dollar gold pieces, minted to and commemorative editions which come out from time to time. Tokens and medals form a collection if they are of the subway and metro types but are not individually classified as coins per se. They become valuable if they are denoting some historical event etc.

Once this basic categorization is done, the dealer then goes on to the next step of grading the specimen coin.