The 'joy' of downsizing

[gxseries]

I'm at the stage in life where I need to free up some cash. So far it's not too bad but it doesn't hurt to have more savings just in case something happens.

When I look at my coin collection - perhaps it has gone out of control as I have boxes of them, ranging from mere change to bulky books. I remembered when I had to move house and when I placed boxes of coins at the trunk, it just seemed like I've loaded too much weight.

So far I have been selling off some of the lower grade coins and common duplicates. That was easy. The real challenge comes to this - there's some coins that are easily in the range of hundreds of dollars. This would have been very easy if there was grade differences. But no, this is what I faced -

1) Similar grade but they are softly struck - one has weakly struck image on the left side, the other on the left. Put the two together and you have one perfect coin. Ugh.

2) One is in strong XF condition but environmentally damaged, the other in VF condition and lightly cleaned

3) Similar condition but different varieties.

4) Cleaned XF versus a decent VF

5) A holed F+ coin versus a worn coin.

And the list goes on.

My current aim is to keep the ones that have better eye appeal. What makes it harder to part with some of them is that even if I wanted to buy them later down the road, the sales record for some of them are in between 1 - 5 on a yearly basis, if not less.

I guess at the end of the day, I can't just live on coins (unless I become a professional coin dealer). It might be a lot easier to just sell the whole lot off and not worry about it.

Have you gone through such experience and what did you do?

 

[Art1.2]

I've been tempted a few times and over the next few years will probably do the same thing. Mostly so they're disposed of in the best way possible rather than leaving it for someone else to sort out.

[thedeadpoint]

Another scenario is that your lottery number gets picked!

 

Tricky situation though. Like you said, eye appeal should win. No one buys ugly coins so if you ever need or want to sell it ALL, you'll have an easier time selling the attractive coins that survived this cut.

[Scottishmoney]

Not so much a "joy" persay, but for the last couple of years have been paring stuff off to auction houses and private collectors. Haven't lost interest in collecting, more like am too busy with work, family and just don't have too much time to spend looking at coins anymore. I am thinking of keeping only the best of the best, like a box of a 100 or so and releasing the rest of the geese back into the wild.