Selling Coins: The Order to Do Things In

One: put down the polish

Half the value that goes missing in a coin sale goes missing before the seller ever leaves the house, and it goes missing to a cleaning rag. What collectors buy is the untouched skin a coin grew over eighty years. Scrub it and you have not made the coin nicer. You have converted a collectible into a lump of metal, and the conversion runs one way only.

Reshuffling costs money too, quietly. The way a set was arranged, the pencil notes on the flips, the tag from a dealer who died in 1991, these tell a buyer what a coin is and where it has been. Tip everything into a grocery sack and that record is simply gone.

• No polish, no dip, no tumbler, no toothbrush, no eraser
• Slabs stay sealed; the plastic is part of the value
• Albums, folders and mint packaging stay assembled
• Keep flips, tags, receipts and anything with handwriting on it

Two: measure the shape of it, not the contents

Nobody is asking you to attribute varieties. You just want enough of a mental picture to tell whether an offer is plausible or insulting.

Three questions answer that. Are there dimes, quarters or halves dated 1964 and back, which means 90% silver. Is anything unmistakably gold. Is anything sealed in hard plastic with a number on the label. In most collections those three buckets hold nearly all the money, and you can check all three in twenty minutes without knowing a thing about coins.

Three: watch how the appraisal is done

The method tells you more than the manner does. A buyer working properly separates before valuing: bullion in one pile against the market, common circulated silver weighed as silver, and anything that might carry a premium set apart and handled coin by coin.

The output should be a document, not a sentence. When a whole box goes on a scale at once and a single number comes back, understand what has happened. Any scarce coins in that box have just been purchased at bulk silver rates, and neither of you will ever know which ones they were.

Four: make them show their work

The right questions are short. Which of these beats melt, and why that one. What is the spread over spot on the bullion. Would any of this be worth submitting for grading before it changes hands.

You are listening for specificity. A buyer who answers in generalities is either not looking closely or would rather you did not. And a figure that expires the moment you walk out was never a valuation, it was a tactic.

Five: get paid, and only for what you meant to sell

Acceptance and payment belong in the same visit. Cash on ordinary totals, a wire or check on larger ones, arranged before you stand up. Coins should never travel out of your sight ahead of an agreed number.

And the sale does not have to be all of it. An itemized offer lets you take the money for the bullion, keep the four coins your father actually hunted down, and walk out square. That is a normal outcome here, not an awkward one.