u/Mysterious-Boat-3608

this is kind of a heavy one so bear with me.

old guy next door passed away a few months ago. no kids. no family anyone knew of. lived alone. landlord came to clean the apartment out and was literally throwing everything in a dumpster. furniture. books. clothes. everything.

i saw him carrying out a small wooden box and asked what it was. he opened it. coins. maybe 60-70 coins in little cardboard flips all hand labeled.

i asked if i could take it. he shrugged and said "saves me a trip to the dumpster." handed it to me like it was nothing.

sat down with this box that night and my chest got tight. this man had organized every coin carefully. neat handwriting on each flip. dates acquired. some had little notes like "estate sale find" or "great example." one just said "favorite" with no other explanation.

started going through them to understand what he had

there's genuinely nice stuff in here. nothing worth thousands but a solid collection that someone clearly spent years building with care. key date mercury dimes. early jeffersons. a really pretty standing liberty quarter. stuff that tells me this guy knew what he was doing.

and it was 30 seconds from a dumpster. decades of careful collecting almost thrown away like garbage because nobody was left who knew or cared.

i'm keeping all of it. not selling a single coin. i don't know this man's name but i know he was a collector and that means something to me. i'm gonna give his collection the respect it deserves.

but it makes me think about what happens to all of us eventually. we spend years building these collections and when we're gone it comes down to whether the right person happens to be standing near the dumpster at the right time.

does anyone else think about this? what happens to your collection if something happens to you? because after this experience i'm writing it into my will.

if the first thing you ask about every coin is "what's it worth" and you've never once looked up the history behind any coin you own... i don't know man. we're not doing the same hobby.

the guy at my coin club who can tell you the entire political context behind the trade dollar? collector. the guy on youtube who tells you to hoard pre-1965 quarters because "silver is going to the moon"? investor. different thing.

nothing wrong with investing in precious metals. genuinely. but don't call yourself a numismatist because you stack silver eagles in a safe. that's not numismatics that's a savings account that doesn't earn interest.

2021 me should be arrested for crimes against numismatics.

needed quick cash. went through my collection and pulled out a few coins i thought were decent but nothing crazy. one of them was a barber quarter i got from my grandpa's stuff. it had some color on it and looked alright but i honestly didn't think much of it. figured it was F/VF range. nothing to write home about.

took it to my LCS with a few other things. he looked at it for a while. longer than the other coins now that i think about it. offered me $50 for it. i said cool. took the cash. bought groceries. forgot about it.

three years later. THREE YEARS. i'm browsing auction results for fun like i do sometimes and i see a barber quarter that looks real familiar. same date. same mint. same specific tone pattern that i remember. and there's a tiny rim ding at 4 o'clock that i KNOW is the same coin because i used to fidget with it.

PCGS graded it AU53. with that toning they called it a CAC piece. original surfaces. the whole deal.

it sold for $4,012.

four thousand dollars. for a coin i sold for fifty because i was too lazy and too ignorant to look twice at it. the dealer saw exactly what it was the second i put it on his counter. probably couldn't believe some idiot was handing him a borderline uncirculated original skin barber quarter for the price of a tank of gas.

i don't care if it takes me an hour per coin. i will never hand someone a $4,000 coin for $50 ever again. that man bought himself a vacation off my ignorance.

i want to hear your horror stories. what did you let go for nothing that turned out to be something? please make me feel less alone in my suffering because this one genuinely keeps me up at night. $4,000. from a coin i carried in my pocket for a while. i literally used a four thousand dollar coin to fidget with at work.

i need to go lie down.