r/coins

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.

Three years ago, I was filling up at a gas station. There was a backpack sitting on the back seat of my car. Inside the backpack was a 1927 Saint-Gaudens gold double eagle that I was planning to take to the bank safe deposit box (PCGS MS64), along with some snacks, a pair of Adidas sneakers, and a few bottles of beer.

A guy who looked like a gang member quietly stole the backpack, but I noticed it right away. I didn’t dare rush up to him because I wasn’t sure if he had a gun or any accomplices. So instead, I secretly followed him, hoping to find out where he lived and then call the police.After following him for about two blocks, I saw him toss my backpack into a trash can on the side of the road.

I quietly picked it up and was shocked to find that the gold coin was still inside!I don’t think he missed it — I watched him search the backpack very thoroughly. The only explanation is that he had never seen a gold coin before and had no idea what it was. He probably thought it was some kind of worthless product tag or label.

Perhaps, apart from a small handful of coin experts and PCGS graders, no one really cares about your collection.

i don't want to be mean but i see 10 posts a day that are literally just "what is this coin" and it's a clearly readable date sitting right there on the coin. type the date and denomination into google. that's it. that's the whole process.

"is this 1944 wheat penny worth anything" i don't know man did you try the absolute bare minimum before posting? the answer is on the first google result. it's been on the first google result since google existed.

i get that beginners need help sometimes. genuinely. but there's a difference between "i need help identifying a worn foreign coin" and "i found a quarter that says 1998 on it is it rare." one is a reasonable question. the other is weaponized laziness.