Coins of the world

Reputable on line coin buyers?

Can anyone recommend a reputable on line coin dealer/buyer? I have a collection of foreign coins dating from the 1850-1950 range in standard 2×2 flip type holders that pretty much fills a cigar box. I would say about 1/3 of them are silver and the rest are copper or nickel. Most of the coins are from Europe…Germany, Britain, Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy with a few from Canada, Mexico and Central America. Most of these were acquired by my grandfather in his travels who served as a bomber pilot in the Air Force from the start of WWII until the late 50’s. I KNOW my US coins but am fairly clueless on foreign coins, especially with silver as volatile as it is right now. I have sold a few on Ebay but quickly came to the conclusion that I really need to know what I am selling or sell them to a reputable and honest buyer who can tell me what I have. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Any time you try to move an entire collection of anything, you are either selling to a dealer, who is looking to sell every piece at a profit, or to a collector, who may pay substantially more than a dealer would for the few pieces they want, and will not want the rest, leaving you more work to do. A dealer can be reputable and honest and pay you a fair price, yet you might not think so because your expectations are too high. The fact is that most world coins, even those more than 100 years old, can be found in a 25 cent, fifty cent or dollar box at a coin shop in the US. There isn’t that much demand.

Anything that’s silver is likely to be scrapped for the silver at 70% of the spot value. I think your estimate of 1/3 being silver is too high. By the 1940s, most countries had eliminated silver from their coins except for higher denominations. I still have my jar of old world coins that I bought for five dollars from an antique dealer associate of my parents back in the late 1960s. I priced them all out about three years ago for a ‘book’ price of $500 and a silver value for the roughly 5% of the 200 or so pieces of $10. That silver value has about tripled since then to $30, for which I’d get about $20 scrap value, and maybe $40 for the rest of them.

There is a reason you will see world coin accumulations being advertised in trade publications by the pound – they are a lot of work for dealers to go through to make any money on. So they can’t afford to pay much.

You can sit down with your coins and a copy of Krause-Mishler’s Standard Catalog of World Coins and price them yourself, and then expect a dealer offer of 10% – 20% of the total valuation. Such an offer would not be unreasonable. Should you be lucky enough to find a rare one in there valued in the hundreds, you can always hold that one (or those, if you’re lucky more than once) aside and get offers separately.

Edit 4/28: Your question prompted me to go back through that jar of coins. I’ve got a little more silver than I thought. Out of 210, there’s 22 silver coins or 10%, with an actual silver weight of 2.8 ounces. That’s about $135 right now. And I think I can do better than the 70% a dealer would pay, maybe closer to 90% on eBay. The key is knowing the exact silver weight of what you have, per coin, and putting it in your listing so buyers can verify the information themselves and know they’re getting what you say.

While I still doubt a third of yours are silver, it would be well worth the time to check. It’ll take a little time and navigation, but you can find out the exact silver weight of any silver coins by going here:

http://secure.numismaster.com/ta/numis.jsp

and clicking on ‘Find My Coin’ and then choose the appropriate selections. Write it down, making columns for date, country, denomination, fineness of silver (ex. .835 for many late 19th-early 20th European coins) and the Actual Silver Weight.

You can still price them individually, and you can do that at this site with a paid subscription. It’s same pricing info you will find in the reference I cited, the KM guide.

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