Coin Collecting - A Retrospective

I have collected coins for most of my life, starting with the blue Whitman books for Lincoln cents. I can still recall sitting at my grandmother's dining room table, sorting through mounds of cents, looking for specimens that I did not already possess in my collection, or occasionally some that were in a better grade (subjective) than ones already in the books. This was the extend of my coin collection, as I was also collecting comic books in much the same way. I remember cashing out my collection as I was leaving college, having run out of money and living in a spare bedroom of a classmate. It wasn't until I married that I returned to coin collecting with any level of seriousness, this time expanding to the silver proof sets of the early 1990's, along with American Silver Eagles.

This all changed when my father-in-law gave me a paper bag filled with various Whitman books of cents, nickels, dimes, and quarters; the church had received them as a donation, but for some reason the clergy could not handle the coins, so the priest in charge directed my father-in-law to take care of it, and so he did, by giving them to me. This jump-started my collecting bug, and I started scanning rolls of coins, pouring through 'junk boxes' at coin shops, trying to complete the sets. In addition, I started to acquire older proof sets, as well as mint sets, from online sources.

I have since scaled back my collection to just the government sets and Silver Eagles, although there is a modest quantity of pre-1965 dimes, quarters, and half dollars remaining, but they are being kept for their silver content, and not as a collection per se. It occurred to me that the business-strike U.S. State quarters in their books were not worth anything more than their face value, and that was never going to change, so I decided to cash out all of those type of coins, in order to give myself the capital to try and make money (making pepper jelly, of all things), as well as purchasing more silver (and a bit of gold), in preparation for the financial changes I am expecting once the dollar is finally brought to its inevitable true value.