Silver Coin Buying: How I Buy Huge Coin Collections

take a look at that [Music] hello everybody silverpicker here and today's video is one that i've wanted to make for quite a long time and finally have decided to do it and i think it's going to be one of the most helpful videos for any of you watching that are interested in getting into the business of buying coins and precious metals so not just the collecting not just the fun aspect but also the side where you can buy large collections piece them out and then ultimately make a profit now i personally use this method of uh business to make a profit for myself i buy and sell coins and precious metals all the time but also it has been the foundation of how i've built my collection on the cheap and what i mean by that is all the coins that you see behind me all the coins that i've showed in my previous videos that are part of my personal collection and my precious metal stack my gold and silver all have come from buying people's collections and then sort of swirling away little bits that i want to keep for myself while flipping the rest keeping the money turning and making a profit and in this video what i'm going to be talking about is the most efficient way to sort through a collection of coins when you're going to value them and then ultimately make an offer on it now in just a moment we're going to be doing sort of like a little case study with a bunch of coins that i got and it's all in a jumble and you're going to see the method that i use to sort through them quickly and efficiently and it's a method that i've been developing and perfecting over the past 10 years of being in this business now if you're interested in getting into the business of buying and selling precious metals and coins whether you want to make a little bit of extra money on the side whether you want a way to sort of get better coins for your own collection on the cheap or whether you ultimately someday want to turn picking and thrifting into a full-time business well you got to stick around and keep watching my channel and the best way to do that is duh hit that big ol red subscribe button and that little bell next to it so you never miss a beat i've got a lot of amazing videos coming out in the beginning of 2021 which is of course next week so stick around hit the subscribe button and if you enjoy this video don't forget to give it a like too that helps the youtube algorithm send it out to more people so more people can learn about this amazing business and hobby so in any case let's take a look at that big old pile of coins and see how i sort through it okay so this is the collection of coins that we're going to be using today this pile this monstrosity of silver you might recognize this actual collection because i did go through it already in a previous video you can check it out in the card over here but do not fret because we're going to be looking at it again today but with a totally different set of eyes again the purpose of this video is to show you how i sort through a collection for the first time make sure that i don't miss anything evaluate it and then can ultimately make an offer on it that's fair to the seller and will give me enough room to make a profit so what we're gonna do is we're going to take a look at these coins and we're going to do it in an organized and methodical way so before we start looking into the specifics of this collection and going through all the different coins and setting them up into piles and doing all that fun stuff there's an important distinction to make right before you even start and that is to determine whether or not you have all the time in the world to evaluate the coins or whether there are some time constraints and the examples of those are in this case i had all the time in the world this is a repeat customer someone who has sold me in the past and has had a good experience so they sold to me again and they actually shipped me these coins i didn't have to pay a dime and then i have a chance to go through them in the luxury of my own home with all the time in the world and then i can actually send him a spreadsheet with all the coins their actual values my offer and then we can come to a deal that is my favorite way of doing things because it leaves the most room for me to make the lowest risk decision i can because i know exactly what i'm buying i can make sure everything's authentic make sure i'm not getting uh screwed on anything and it also allows me to make the most fair offer to the customer because then i am sure if i can lock in my profit i typically try and get between 20 and 30 profit uh when i buy a collection in this case i had a 25 profit i paid 75 percent of the value to the to the seller and i was confident in the higher prices that i was able to pay him because i had all the time in the world to evaluate it on another end of the spectrum where let's say you're at a garage sale you say hey man do you have any coins and they bring out an album full of coins or even worse like a shoe box full of a bunch of different coins and you know they're antsy they just want you to make them an offer and that's that you don't really have all the time in the world so you need to sort of do a fast track now maybe i'll do another video where i show off how to do that but in this case i'm just going to be showing you exactly how i evaluate a collection when i've got all the time in the world either they've given me the coins and i can take them home and there's an element of trust or it's a private purchase where i've been invited into their home i can spread out on their kitchen table and go through things and maybe even spend one two or even three hours at their house going through everything before i make an offer with that said what do we do to actually start now because i do mostly purchase coins from the united states i have a very u.s centric view of how i do this so the first thing i do is i try and determine whether it's mostly u.s coins mostly world coins or some combination and if it is what i usually do is i focus on the u.s coins first start to sort those and then i see if there are any foreign coins i save those till the end so we're going to start by sorting through things and grouping them in sort of their major groups so i'm going to be putting all the foreign coins or world coins to the side and then within the us coins i'm going to start to group them by denomination i see we've got some of these giant coins i can see on the reverse that these are panamanian balboas obviously these are not intended for circulation even though these are technically coins uh because they have a denomination they are from the republic of panama but these are easy ones to just put on the side to research later now it's important not to get overly excited about anything and what i mean by that is like if you see some morgans don't start looking for the variety that you know don't start looking at the details because you will end up running at a time and you need to do this efficiently because remember time is money i could spend all the time you know researching these going on numista.com and seeing uh stuff that i don't know about you know silver content but that's not for now again that's for later it's more important to just get everything sorted first and then you can start really uh getting into the nitty-gritty now as i sort some of this you know i think it's worthwhile to talk a little bit about sort of like the business ethics of all of this right because i'm buying these collections and in this case the person is trusting me entirely now that sounds like a pretty stupid thing to do right like just trust somebody that they're going to pay you you know you send them uh 12 and a half pounds of silver like this guy did like is that stupid well it depends it would be pretty stupid to do that to somebody that you know you never had any interaction with that doesn't have a reputation that would be very very foolish but in my case there's a couple things that are sort of going for this guy to trust me one is that i've got a lot more to lose than he does right i have a big public youtube channel it's not a secret that i make some money from the youtube channel so i have a financial and a reputational you know reason why i don't want to create a situation where you know i'm ripping someone off aside from this so this is like three thousand dollars worth of silver right he sent me about a thousand dollars worth of rare bank notes so he sent me four thousand dollars but that was not the first time he did it he had sent me about three thousand dollars worth of gold in the past which that was the first time he did it and that was a big risk because he didn't know me he only knew me from my channel but like i said there is some element of trust there because i have a lot more to lose than he does in a sense right if he gets ripped off right he loses the gold that he sent me let's pretend it's the first time right but i lose my reputation because he's gonna go out there and he's gonna start you know making a big stink about how silver picker ripped him off and how no one should trust him and then basically creating not only a problem among viewers like you know people will not want to view my videos at that point but also there are other issues because i have sponsorships right sponsors help pay for a lot of this right they help pay for some of the stuff that i buy so i can show it off it helps me pay for camera equipment for my video editor i would lose sponsors for sure if they found out that i was ripping people off you know willy nilly so that gives him reason to say okay i can maybe trust this guy so building up trust is really really important for a business like this if you're going into the coin or or silver business you need to be trustworthy because most of the people well maybe not most of the people but there are a lot of really shady characters in this business and it turns a lot of people off and that's why people sort of sit on the collections that they inherited you know for for many many years because they just don't know who to trust to sell it to and that is sort of where i've made a lot of my money because i have been honest again that doesn't mean that you need to uh you know be a saint right i'm not i'm not going out of my way to give somebody 99 of the value so i make a one percent profit right i'm not trying to make one dollar on every hundred dollars i want to make something that makes it worth my time so i'm making in this case 25 of the profit based on the value of this collection and some of this stuff i do keep for my own collection or my own silver or precious metals stack basically i'm making 25 off the bat but if this stuff goes up in value right if gold continues to go up if silver continues to go up that will sort of extend my profit even more of course there is the risk that it could also go down but i put the gold with the gold and all that so i continue to sort of sort this and in just a very very short period of time we were able to sort this entire set of coins into two piles remember it was a big mishmash of confusion a minute ago and now we have it somewhat organized so now what i usually do is i focus on breaking down the us stuff even further now the first thing i like to do when i have american stuff is make sure that there isn't any clad stuff in there and i already see that there is a bunch of clad stuff which i've organized as i've been sort of putting things away we've got all of these clad ikes and at this point i do start to look through them i'll look through them one by one to make sure that none of them are the silver clad varieties and in this case all of these are just run-of-the-mill one dollar coins that can basically be brought back to the bank uh sometimes i'll just include these in grab bags and sometimes honestly i'll just bring them back to the bank because uh you know i've bought so many collections if i would have held on to these i'd probably have over a thousand dollars by this point in clad eisenhower's so i take this and i put that off onto the side and what i do is i mark it down in my spreadsheet so i'm going to put my spreadsheet over here and i'll start off i'll sort of reference it as i go through this but i do not pay more than face value for these kind of coins additionally there's also a 1989 kennedy half and that of course is also not worth more than face value so i would put those on the spreadsheet as face value and typically what i do when i put stuff on a spreadsheet i will color code it for anything that's out of the ordinary so normally if i say to the guy i'm paying 75 uh of the market value again for all of you haters in the comments i'm not paying him 75 of face value that would be ridiculous i pay him 75 of the market value with few exceptions in this case the exception is i pay only face i'll never pay anybody less than face value for uh american coins that i can just you know bring back to the bank so in this case i would highlight the line items in gray so he knows that this is not he's not getting 75 percent of the value he's actually getting a hundred percent of the face value in this case uh because i don't believe that there's a market value higher than face so now what i do is i do like to go for the bigger and more important stuff first so what i'll do is i see i've got a big pile of of morgan silver dollars right and what i try to do is i try to actually sort them into two different piles i try to sort them into culls and non-calls and here we go so here when i see an obvious um you know key date or something this one says 1878 cc it's super super important after you get excited right obviously when i saw this i'm like holy moly holy moly right and especially because i see the old price all the other ones are like listed at like a couple bucks like nine dollars and fifty cents uh some of them were even five dollars and 25 cents right so 16 from back in the day uh and it's a carson city the most important thing to do is before you start putting numbers into your spreadsheet just confirm that it truly is a carson city so in this case you can of course see that it is a cc mint mark so it is a carson city so in that case when i see an obvious key date or something special i do put it off on the side and make a point to look at that later never buy the holder buy the coin right that's true about graded coins but also about not created coins right like you might think that this might be a special coin that deserves you know extra extra value but the truth is it might be in better condition than some of these but it doesn't actually necessarily mean that it's actually worth more i see i've got a roll right i've got a tube full of what looks like morgan dollars i check to see what they are again not going through them too uh you know too much with a fine-tooth comb so we've got a bunch of morgans over here we got a bunch of peace and it looks like we're done with the silver dollars now i try and go down one denomination i see i've got some of these barber halves so barber halves this is a special one so this is an 1830 um capped bust half dollar it's in real rough shape you can see i can actually take it out of the the holder because it was already falling out but take a look at that and now i just start to divide more i see some quarters three different types three different eras of quarters we've got the washington the standing liberty and the barber and i still put all those all together for now and it looks like here we've already sorted out all of these uh war nickels but what i like to do is if i see anything that looks like particularly good condition like these two on top i put those off to the side because these are uncirculated and these will be worth more so i put these in that pile of let's examine them more later and by the way when i buy collections and there's a lot of copper i will also separate that out and put that on the side for a little bit so now that we've gotten these all broken down we can start to determine whether the things are junk silver or whether they have some numismatic value and that is the goal that we're trying to get to right now right so we started by breaking them down between us uh bullion and foreign then we broke them down by denomination and now we're going to go through each denomination and sort of start to vet whether or not these will go for sort of like their basic melt value or in the case of morgan dollars like more than melt but what their market value is or if there's some additional premium so what i would do for instance is with stuff like this right we've got all of these war nickels warnickels are one of the exceptions that i do not pay 75 of the value for because they are really really hard to unload and even though i believe that these will start to go up in price and up in premium in the future i think that silver is silver and people will want it and just because there is plenty of uh sort of inexpensive or relatively inexpensive junk silver that's at 90 um i think that eventually these lower percentages like these 35 percent in the 40 kennedy halves will start to go up in value and will have uh more significant premiums but in in the current situation uh i only pay 50 of the uh market value for war nickels and for 40 kennedy halves so these would go on the spreadsheet and i'd count them up i always make sure that they are indeed were nickels right and the best way to do that of course is to make sure that the mint mark is above uh monticello or monticello depending on how you pronounce it uh make sure that the letter is above the building and not in a tiny little spot to the right of the building these all have mint marks above the building you can see right there so these are indeed war nickels so now i would add this to my spreadsheet and typically what i do is i put the type of coin the quantity the price per coin and then the total value so if let's say these are a dollar each and i've got 11 of them then the total price is 11 for the lot and then i sort of put these off on the side so now all the work here is done for me right because i already know basically i've been doing this for so long i know the multiples that i'm going to be paying i know the multiples that i can sell them for and i basically just can put these all in the spreadsheet and that's a wrap and then i can really spend the majority of my time focusing on sort of the harder questions right like what would i grade this ad what would a grade like that go for so what i like to spend my time on is not going through each one of these with a fine-tooth comb although i do check i do check all these coins for key dates and major varieties but i don't check my coins for like minor varieties um honestly people who buy the coins for me if they find that i sold them a minor variety and they can get you know another you know 20 value out of it good for them for me i don't have the time for that i don't have the patience for it and it's just that's not my business my business is buying large collections sorting through them selling the silver uh you know for effectively you know the junk silver for um for spot or maybe 10 above spot um and then uh basically you know looking through these special coins and selling these individually so that takes up a lot less time than if you were to go through every single coin and look for every variety so what i would do is i basically go on ebay sold listings i use worth point i have a few other sources heritage auctions and i see if any of these coins have a particular value the melt value beyond even just sort of like the slight premium but like a real numismatic premium so this is the kind of thing that i want to spend my time focusing on because you know if i lose a couple bucks from missing something you know some small variety and instead of getting a 10 profit on that coin i'll get a you know i missed out on a 20 profit on the coin it's not a huge deal when we're talking about volume like this but i want to make sure that i get the right profit of this because if i screw up on this this could end up being a miss you know a miss of a hundred dollar profit or something in any case now i've got the time to go through those and obviously there are some things that i do behind the scenes that i didn't show on camera for instance after i've sorted all these into piles i do check them like i said for key dates and again always look at the coin itself not the holder i can't tell you how many times i've seen mislabeled holders even in this collection there were a couple of mislabeled holders so read the coin check the mint mark make sure you're looking at the actual right coin and then see if any of these are key dates and i separate the key dates and i separate anything that looks like it could be in mint state condition and otherwise everything gets added to the spreadsheet and i multiply the number of items of that particular type by the price per item and then i end up with the total value that i'm going to be buying it for so i do that with all those i put those in the spreadsheet and then i move on to the foreign coins so once i finish with all the american coins and i've gotten them all in the spreadsheet then i start on the foreign coins and i just start to sort them by countries and voila we're good see see in a lot of cases when you've got more and it's older and you also have a bunch of non-silver stuff it takes a little bit longer you know i've bought collections where i literally just get a shoe box full of coins and a lot of them are foreign and of course a lot of those foreign coins are basically worthless um so that takes a lot longer in this case these coins were mostly pre-vetted to be all silver and i think you just threw in a couple of other coins that might be worth money but now i can sort of go through uh the coins in a much more organized manner because i have it by country canadian coins because it's close proximity with the united states makes it very easy to do a similar process with the canadian coins so through i'll sort them i'll look to see if there are any key dates and otherwise it'll again be mostly junk silver with of course the larger denominations like the silver dollars and boy i love love love these canoe dollars they're really beautiful um but these of course get a little bit higher premium these don't just go for melt uh you know i go through them and do the same process i did with the american coins with the foreign coins that are not canadian i usually have to use ebay worth point and other outside resources um to figure out their value and in a lot of cases especially for the smaller stuff i usually will just look up the weight and fineness of the silver on like a website like numista for instance and then i'll just multiply that out and i will pay uh some percentage of melt um because you know for a lot of these foreign circulated uh silver coins you know if they're like let's say some of them have like you know 85 percent pure silver some of them are 72 percent and some of them are even lower they go down to like 30 and even 10 silver so those i usually just uh calculate up the value and pay out a percentage of the melt and that's basically how i do it you know with the foreign coins it's a little bit more work because there are so many different types and there's so many different weights and finenesses of the silver purities etc you know what i mean and the market is much much weaker for these coins so i usually pay a little bit less than i do for american coins which i can flip just like that and then once i'm done with all the foreign in the u.s i move on to the silver rounds and i just start to sort them and if you're interested in buying any of these some of these i'll be selling on my instagram account so just message me you send me a dm at the silver picker on instagram so i just sort of stack these up by type and in most cases i found that when i buy collections they usually have a lot of the same type of silver round if they are if they are sort of a silver stacker and that's that and then what i do is i do a quick search on ebay and i see whether or not these have any particular premium above their melt value in this case some of them had a slight premium others had basically no premium and then i decide on what i can offer based on that but the key to being fair to your client is be honest about what the market value is there's nothing wrong with making an offer that's below the market value obviously if the profit but if you give uh the person you're buying from the power to make the decision with all the information then it's a lot easier for them to even want to give you a good deal they know it takes a lot of work to sort through this and then to resell it and do all the research and have all the knowledge of course to do it in the first place so they understand that but if you start to like mess with them and not give them real prices or you try and make it seem like you're giving them more than you really are that's when sort of you start to lose that reputation and aside from it being just not the right thing to do it also will hurt your business opportunities in the future and of course after the silver i do the gold these turned out to be fake i tested these how did i test them well they're actually magnetic so they're definitely not gold but this mexican two peso coin is indeed real gold this one i'm holding on to and that's that doesn't this look much nicer more organized than the previous one when we first started the video yeah i think so when i'm on my own after i get a big shipment of gold or silver or coins or whether i'm at somebody's house and doing it over it at their kitchen table this is exactly the method that i use i do a divide and conquer and then i divide the division and then i divide the division of the division and so on and so forth until i can get down to the nitty-gritty and that saves so much time and i put it all in a spreadsheet on my computer and that way when i'm done i can show the person that i'm buying from exactly what they have exactly what the market value is and exactly what i'm willing to pay and then of course if we need to we can still negotiate a little bit sometimes they'll haggle a little bit and uh depending on what i think the resellability of the collection is depends you know sort of determines whether or not i can give them a little bit more uh in this case this was an excellent collection i did really well on it the seller was really happy with it he's already shipped me out another box that is actually equal in size to this so i'm getting another 12 pounds of coins coming in the next couple of weeks so i will be doing plenty of videos on that but i really hope you enjoyed this and i hope you learned something from it so for the question of the day in the comments below put your questions down of what you'd like to know more about when it comes to the process of buying coin collections maybe i missed something maybe there are things you still don't understand that's what i want to hear about that's what i want you to put down in the comments what are other things you'd like to learn about related to the process of buying large coin collections and reselling them for a profit so did you all learn something well i certainly hope you did because i have a lot of fun sharing with you my methodology and i'm really excited for each and every one of you to get started in this business if that's what you're trying to do and if you're new to this the best way to start is just letting people in your neighborhood know that you're the coin buying guy or you're the coin buying gal so that when they do get a coin collection when they inherit one when somebody gives it to them and they want to sell it they call you first now don't get discouraged if at the beginning when you first start sorting through coin collections it's a little overwhelming it's very much like drinking from a fire hose because you'll encounter so many different types of coins with different metals with different countries with different purities with all sorts of different characteristics and you're going to have to spend a lot of time learning on the fly but that's what's fun about it and the best part is the silver lining is that every single coin collection you buy you learn a little bit more and can apply that to the next one and the next one and the next one i remember the first few times that i bought coin collections it was overwhelming and it took me forever to go through all the different coins in all the different countries today in most cases i can get through 95 of the collections just like that in just a few minutes and sometimes on the fly if i need to like at a garage sale i can make a very fair offer on a big box of coins in probably just 5 or 10 minutes and that is the place that you guys want to get to so i really hope you enjoyed this video if you learned something please consider giving it a big like that helps with the youtube algorithm and it gets the video out to more people so we can get more people into this amazing hobby and business and if you really want to learn more i would encourage you to hit that big ol red subscribe button i have tons and tons of videos all about coin collecting precious metals investing and even personal finance how to make a little bit of extra money on your own terms and don't we all need that so in any case i hope you enjoyed this video got a lot more great stuff coming down the pike so stay tuned and until then silver picker out a huge huge thank you to all of my wonderful patrons thank you so much for such an amazing year this is the first year of me having a patreon and i am so proud of the community that we have built together on discord i am so excited to get to know each and every one of you even better in 2021 and anyone else who wants to join you guys are more than welcome you

Channel: Silverpicker

Views: 35,013

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Id: ArdT7Ucn2tI

Length: 27min 53sec (1673 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 31 2020