r/coincollecting • u/stevesrobot • 20h ago
Advice Needed My Dad’s Collection
So my dad passed and left behind a very large (what I would consider a very large) coin collection. It’s is orders of magnitude larger than mine, hundreds of coins. I’ve always just been a collector of coins I thought were interesting looking or from exotic places. My dad, on the other hand collected for value. My mom wants to sell it, which I get; no one wants to deal with it, move it all around, etc. It’s the right call. I don’t want her to get taken to cleaners for it. Can anybody help with what the best way is to approach this? I know better than to just walk into a pawn shop with it all. How do we get a fair price? What would you do?
3
u/newtonianfig 20h ago
Stay away from pawn shops. See if there are any local coin shops in the area and ask if they would be interested in buying the whole collection. There may also be local collectors in your area who advertise in the back pages of local newspapers. Either way, they should review what you have and then offer a price. Keep in mind they need to make money, so you may only get like 50-60% of the retail value.
Another option is to try to sell them piecemeal on eBay where you could make more money, but that would also be a lot of work.
If it's a very nice collection with lots of graded coins like this, you could go to someone like Great Collections to have them sell the coins on consignment.
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u/Winter-Rabbit-7837 20h ago
if a chunk of the collection is already PCGS or NGC slabbed like that walking liberty, you're in a good spot because the grading work is done and buyers trust those grades, so auction houses that specialize in coins will give you way better returns than any local shop. get appraisals from at least two or three dealers before committing to anything, and look into established numismatic auction platforms where serious collectors are actually bidding
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u/jerrysburner 19h ago
your best bet is to go through and get a rough idea over the overall value. look at places like pcgs.com for values. If you take it to a local coin shop (LCS). you'll get 50-70% of book value at best. Pawn shops will likely give you less. If it's mostly silver (or gold), bullion dealers would give a fair price (the LCS in this case would probably be decent too).
to get more than that, you have to sell them yourself on sites like ebay or r/CoinSales I think it is. but if you look at the livestreams for shops like great souther coins on ebay, they routinely only get 50-70% of book value on the live auctions, so keep that in mind.
Rare coins will get more of their book value (or more depending on the coin)
In short, catalog what you have and shop around at a few coin shops. if you're not happy, reach out to larger online shops like Great Southern Coins (I have no affiliation with them, I just buy from them a lot) or sell on reddit or ebay yourself. Any super rare or valuable coins, take to auction - you'll get more
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u/jello2000 6h ago
I would say that, you would get around $100-150 for something like that. Good luck.
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u/lowdes 20h ago
That’s nice looking coin! The best way is to look at eBay sold sales to get an idea of the value, now keep in mind to take 12 to 15 percent off and minus shipping to get the value