How Much are My Coins Worth - A Guide to Valuing a Coin Collection at Home

Coin Collection As-Found

Most people who are gifted a coin collection, receive coins from a family member, or are just starting to collect will have in common is that they don't have a great basis for valuing a coin collection at home by themselves. It's natural to ask yourself "how much are my coins worth" and get overwhelmed by the number of different answers you get by looking online or walking into a book store. I've written this guide to help you get started on that journey by telling you how I typically look through friends and family members' coin collections.To help explain the entire process, I'm using a friend's coin collection which was recently found in their storage. They were interested in knowing if there were any particularly valuable individual coins and about how much the collection is worth. Altogether, I spent about 2 1/2 hours going through every coin in detail and taking pictures for this article. As you can see, it can take a fair amount of time to understand what you have. I hope you find this article helpful as you start to evaluate your collection.

Understanding Types of Appraisals

I think the best place to start is with an overview of different types of appraisals and price guides. Your appraisal should reflect the way you plan to use the information. For example, if you were looking to sell your entire collection for quick money at an antique store or pawn shop you would be doing yourself a disservice by preparing for the sale with a retail appraisal. Similarly, if you have an online auction service that allows you to price and individually sell items you could lose potential money by offering your coins based on a wholesale/bulk evaluation.

1. Retail Appraisal: This is the most likely price you will find with price guides and you are unlikely to realize this value unless you have rare or other hard-to-find coins. A retail appraisal is a likely sticker price that you would find for each individual coin at a high-end coin shop. They're similar to insurance company appraisals because an insurance policy would need to cover replacement for every one of your itemized coins in the event of a disaster.

2. Certified Coin Values: Third Party coin certifying companies will offer a service that tells average or expected prices for coins they have assigned a grade (0-70) based on other coins graded by the company and sold at recent auctions. These prices will usually be higher - sometimes significantly higher - than the prices realized for raw (ungraded) or coins graded by lower tier services.

3. Auction Appraisal: These are the prices recently paid by buyers at auctions and includes buyer and seller premiums that are paid to auction companies. This can be 20% or more over the price the seller receives.

4. Likely Price: This is the term that I use meaning how much I expect the seller could reasonably receive by selling to a collector or receive from an auction gallery after taking out any premiums

5. Wholesale or Bulk Price: The price you would get for large collections that are sold without any key (the rarest and most valuable coins of a type) or major varieties (errors or other atypical coins of a type).

6. Dealer Offer: Generally, this is the lowest value you would get in an appraisal and reflects what a dealer is likely to offer a seller for an entire collection. This certainly does not mean dealers aren't offering a fair price! Dealers offer what they consider reasonable based on their inventory and what they could sell the coins for. It accounts for inventory they have, overhead they carry, and the way they like to sell. You can see what kind of offers to expect from a dealer by looking at the pricing they have on what they sell. High shelf price from them might mean high offers to you - low shelf price from them means a lower offer to you.

It should be apparent from this listing that there are a lot of potential prices that can be applied to the same coin in different situations. The rest of this guide tells you how to critically look through your coin collection to find the best value.

Organize the Collection by Country and Denomination

Coins sorted by country and denomination

Now that you know what kind of appraisals there are, it's time to start looking through your collection. The picture above shows how a typical collection is likely stored - all together in a single bag or box. It's really hard to tell much from a pile of coins other than what is most common in the set. In this case, Washington Quarters made up the bulk of the volume with quite a few silver dimes scattered throughout. The first thing to do is to split the collection up into stacks or piles by country and then denomination as I've done in the picture below. Note that this is only for collections that appear to be circulated (pulled from change at one time or another). If you collection looks shiny and new; you'll want to make sure you don't let the coins hit each other and are handled with cotton gloves on a soft surface. Top grade coins can have significant drops in price (10x reduction in extreme cases) by mishandling even once - circulated coins won't have the same change in value by dropping lightly.At this point, you'll have a better understanding of what's in the collection. A lot of little stacks means a broad collection that will take more research. A few large stacks will lead to a smaller amount of research and more time looking for varieties.

Sort Each Denomination by Year and Mint Mark

This step is most helpful with large stacks of coins in the same denomination. Types that you only have 1 or two of don't require this step, you can just look into individual coin as described in the next sections. For example, there are a lot of Washington quarters in this collection and only one Standing Liberty Quarter - I jumped right in by researching the date rather than the type. For me, I do this step with rows by mint mark and column by date because it's easier in the space I have. You can do it however you find most convenient but you should organize so you can quickly look through the collection for your best coins (once you know what they are - you'll find that out in the next step).The year is pretty easy for most coins and you might only run into problems with foreign coins (different numerals) and US gold coins (some have roman numerals). Medals and tokens may or may not have dates so if you find something without a date, it could be a medal which is a whole different method of appraising. You'll notice the Saskatchewan token in the pictured collection.The mint mark can be more difficult. United States coins will have a small P on coins made in Philadelphia (no mint mark coins are mostly from Philadelphia), D on coins from Denver, S for San Francisco, O for New Orleans, CC for Carson City, W for West Point, C for Charlotte (gold), and D for Dahlonega (gold). Other countries have a variety of different mint marks that are either letters, numbers or symbols. Further research will be needed for each type if different mint marks exist.

Research the Denomination for Key Dates and Varieties

Looking at coins under digital microscope

Showing Difference between nickel varieties

Now is the time to start looking at price guides. Once you have the denomination organized and easily visible, you can start looking at these resources in the context of your collection. Opening them before now just gives too much information to process at one time. Before looking at any price guide values, make sure to read the introduction. The introduction will tell you which category they consider the values to be in. You should also pay close attention to the publication date - coin values can go up or down dramatically over a period of just a few months and certainly across years.I generally use a few different references at this point and I'll include some links for where you could buy them online. First is a retail value book - my preference is The Official Red Book A Guide Book of United States Coins by R.S. Yeoman. I use the Red Book to determine which dates are common based on the mintage and the value and which are rare as represented by higher values than most. The second source I use is The Official Blue Book Handbook of United States Coins by R.S. Yeoman. This source provides information about wholesale prices for a lower end estimate of individual coin prices. Below is further discussion on how to factor this information into your pricing.At this point you should be aware that there are common coins and rare coins. Dealers call common date coins - especially worn silver ones - "junk"; that doesn't mean that they're without value, it just means that your likely only able to sell it based on the scrap price or bulk price rather than having much of a numismatic premium.Rare coins range from slightly harder to find all the way to unique. Key dates are the hardest to find coin (sometimes coins) of a given type. For example, the key date Washington quarters are the 1932 San Francisco and 1932 Denver (approximately the same mintage with slightly less being made in San Francisco). Neither of those coins happen to be in this collection.Varieties are major changes to a coin design that happened through the minting years of a coin. The example below shows Variety I and Variety II buffalo nickels Variety I coins were only made for part of 1913 and the rest of the years (including the end of 1913) were variety II. For that reason, I can tell that there are multiple 1913 buffalo nickels in this collection even though the date is completely worn off the variety I coins. Sometimes, varieties are also called types as in the Type I and Type II standing liberty quarters.At this point, you're only reviewing reference guides for prices that are not like the others. You should be able to quickly find the key dates based on the guides. Don't use any individual price guide as the definite value of your coins; you should only use it as a reference to understand which coins have more value than the rest of the type.

Look Through the Coins with Your New Knowledge

Having gained some knowledge about the type of coin you're looking at, you can set an average or common date value that you expect to assign to each common coin. Most modern silver coins will have a common date value somewhere around the scrap price for low grade coins and start to increase on coins that have details like hair lines, small letters, feather marks on birds and other finer details.For beginners, you should grade coins into a low, mid, and high grade category. Expect that most common coins are in "G / Good" condition or slightly lower the lowest of the named grades - this means you can read the year and tell what design it is but there are no fine details.If a coin shows a good amount of the finer details, you can use either the "F / Fine" or "VF / Very Fine" valuation - you'll notice a large step change in price depending on which you choose. It is surprising to most people how much difference there is at this lower end of the grading scale.Coins that have nearly full detail and still have mint luster (shininess), use the "AU / About Uncirculated" pricing; The top end of the scale can have some coins that look nearly perfect to a new collector but are considered much lower by a 3rd party grading service's scale. These top end coins should have expert opinion applied for coins that aren't common dates.I use a price guide at this point by starting with the highest value "Good" (low grade) coins to see if I have any key dates. From there, I look at the price guides for any higher grade coins you have. For example, the common 1982 Washington Quarters are worth their face value of 25 cents in low grades but since they're rare in high grade, there is a much higher premium for those. You should verify that any price guide you're using is current and matches the type of appraisal value you're expecting.

Look at Every Coin for Errors

This is the step that most people skip and is the one that takes the majority of the time. I started doing this check recently when I got a digital microscope to avoid the eye strain from looking through a magnifying glass for potentially hours at a time. If you care to, you can look at all the lettering and the design of each coin to find die breaks (anything from a crack to a missing piece of the design), repunched mint marks (look like letters on top of other letters as shown in the repunched D on the dime below that I found in this collection), die doubling (visible in numbers or letters on top of each other from the process of the die being made), or other non-standard strikes (for example strike through where contamination like grease or string gets on the die and leaves an imprint on the coin that is made). This step takes a lot of time and patience but can certainly result in valuable findings. If you're in hurry only look for the most notable ones that are published in regular price guides.

Close-up of dime mintmark

Once you made it through the first denomination, you can move on to the next. I generally start with the highest denomination and work my way to the smallest - for this example, I started with the dollars and made my way down to cents. You might find it easier if you start with the biggest stack and move your way to the smaller stack.

Conclusion

This may sound like a lot of work but it's really necessary to at least do some research before selling a collection. Anytime you go into a transaction, you should be armed with enough knowledge to understand what is a good deal and what is not. You'll be able to point out the best coins to the buyer and likely get a better deal out of it. I gave you a couple of reference books that I regularly use to focus on the most valuable coins while evaluating a collection. If you do get to the point where you're ready to sell, you can prepare yourself to sell to a coin dealer with a current month price guide. Most dealers will use The Coin Monthly Greysheet for wholesale pricing to make an offer - you can access that same information yourself to help yourself get a better deal.However, if you are using this knowledge for your collection that you're going to keep, I recommend that you take your time and do the evaluation in multiple sessions. It's especially important if you're new to the hobby because it will help keep your interest high. You also should write down what you find with notes that you might find helpful in the future. This way you can come back to your findings in the future and see what you want to look at or keep differently.Regardless of the purpose of finding the value of your collection, you should first know what prices your reference material is giving you and then know how to apply that pricing to your specific coins. Those steps will give you the best valuation for your collection and it will match your planned use. Good Luck!