2008 – Year of New Beginnings!
Published by Larry on Tagged 1800's Coins, Bartering for Coins, Instuctional, Metal Detecting Tips, Selling Detector Finds
Happy New Year! Make this year a time of treasure finding and building your coin collections with metal detectors. Very soon I will release a new ebook with lots of great pictures of finds and techniques for increasing your finds. The #8 means new beginnings. Here are some steps that will make this a more productive and meaningful year both for finding and buying coins.
Step 1: Be willing to be adventurous. With a treasure finding mindset and confidence in your ability to excel as a hobbyist, do things in a new way. By using a permission form/letter, go after those new sites both residential (biggest untapped field) and commercial. Try some new electronic tools and equipment. Electronic probes have come down in price and make a big difference in retrieval speed. All the major metal detector companies have entry level machines that have excellent depth and features that will test your learning curve. Some of my favorites are the Fisher F2, Tesoro Silver U Max, Garrett 250, White’s Prism, and the Minelab Musketeer.
Step 2: Become a coin collector not a mere accumulator. Find/acquire and arrange coins in a systematic way. Be motivated by intangible rewards like the art, history and beauty of the coins (unlike investors, who tend to be obsessed with just the financial gain). Dedicated collectors in the long run will have the biggest monetary rewards. Whether you find, barter or buy coins, have a discriminating taste, give attention to detail and the result will be coins with unusual appeal that will have greater value when sold. Here is a beauty that I found with a detector and I believe it to be unique. Notice the doubling of date and stars and other features (The reverse also has doubling).
It was not my motive to sell this coin when found. I discovered its minting errors several years after the find when cataloguing my silver dollar finds. I will offer this coin for sell in the near future. Coin collecting (and all collectibles) hold a special fascination to those pursue them. Coins are portable, easily stored in large numbers and easy to hide in times of distress or emergency. They are durable, surviving for centuries (even when lost or buried) in much the same condition as when they were made. They are historical like this 1861 Copper Nickel Cent of the Civil War found in Tarpon Springs where two escapees of Fort Brooke were hung without trial (See article – The Story A Coin Could Tell).
They are hand-held works of art, whose designers created masterpieces that are cherisedas much as a portriat of da Vinci or Rembrandt. On top of everything else, historically coins rise in value substantially over time, provided that the collector choses items that are genuinely rare and preserves them carefully.
Step 3: Set some long and short-term goals for 2008. The one coin that has eluded my 39 years of metal detecting is the 20 cent piece and that is my long term goal for this year. Challenge yourself to find some new varieties or excede previous highs and focus on what you want to find. It is amazing how focusing on specific targets leads to finding them. The law of attraction works!
Make 2008 great! This is your year of new beginnings. Here’s to “diggin it”! Larry
February 22nd, 2008 at 3:44 am
I enjoy reading your blogs, looking forward to the ebook.