I can show you how to create a “Coin Cash Cow” from pocket change, and I can do it in just 5 minutes a day in the privacy of your own home.
Coinology Searches are fun and productive and can yield a LOT of money while you’re doing good spiritual work at the same time. Let me tell you how to make TONS of money from coin searches: Continue reading
Here’s a sneak peek at just one of the many hundreds of really cool and very richly rewarding coins that popped up in last night’s “Barf Bag” search — the coins were discards from other searches, deemed so miserable that they ended up in a bin and eventually in a bag, which I opened and am currently in the process of searching.
I’ve found a few 1924-d, some 1909 VDB and two 1909-s that have seen better days, but they’re readable enough to sell, although in this case, I’m not offering this grouping for sale — it’s intended as an example of what someone can accomplish in a single night, armed only with coin-knowledge and a taste for punishment.
Finding the goodies among the trash is sort of like dumpster-diving, and in a way, it bears some resemblance to it.
One thing that happens in a search like this, you never know what’s going to turn up.
It doesn’t matter whether the source of your search coins is a personal collection, institutional collection, just a bunch of coins that piled up in a jar somehow, or you bought them as a grouping of folders, or as a bag or box or rolls.
The end effect is the same — there’s some searching to be done. Continue reading
Before you start in on my coins, my grading and my retail prices, lemme just say this — nobody in my shop pays retail.
Fact is, I don’t really want to sell the coins that I’ve jammed just about everywhere in the shop, at least everywhere that I can reasonably hope to have some viewers and some degree of safety against boosting.
Those coins demonstrate something very, very clearly:
If you know your grading, you can make a fortune in coins.
That’s a fact, incontrovertible and demonstrable. You simply buy coins at a flat rate price, then find the goodies therein.
Of course, you’ll need a trustworthy and reliable source for your coins, and most of the suppliers are cheaters or worse — it’s literally a jungle out there.
The high-grade coins have been thoroughly searched for everything — that’s where the money is.
The medium-grade coins just don’t sell, period.
The low-grade coins are plentiful in certain dates, but other dates and mint-marks are very elusive all the way to downright unavailable, like the newly-discovered element “Unobtainium” that nobody can seem to get hold of — I only have the one sample, and that ate a hole through my desk yesterday afternoon, on its way to the center of the Earth.
I’m afraid to go anywhere near the hole. I’ve covered it up with a tiger trap, so the next person who steps on it will have quite an experience, I’d imagine.
The Hole into Hell. Continue reading
You get the basic building blocks for a Lincoln Set, 1909-1929, which fits into the Littleton Green Folder.
When you’ve built the collection far enough, it will be transferred over to a Dansco album for resale, minus the key dates, but with all the semi-keys in place, but that’s not for now, not until you understand the medium AND the message.
So, here’s the rundown — prices are approximate and will vary SLIGHTLY, based on coin condition, but at this level, it hardly matters whether it’s a nickel or a dime more or less.
These are the basic coins you’ll need to fill in first: Continue reading
There’s a world of treasure, real treasure, the kind you can take to the bank, and yet, it’s as-if invisible to most people, who look right past the treasures of life, in a bleak vision of the present.
It’s not that hard to transform the vision from “bleak” to “clear”, but it takes a bit of bait and the dangling of a hook to catch the fish, as it were.
What’s needed is a goal, and a goal doesn’t come about without a payoff.
The payoff?
Simple — Money.
Of course, that’s only the apparent payoff. The real payoff is an immediate improvement in vision, clarity and presence-of-attention, which is the kind of powerful presence that can be invoked through the use of special attentions, such as the ones employed in a coin search. Continue reading
Here’s a rundown of what specific actions I take with a new bag or box or roll of wheaties to be searched. It’s basic, and of course doesn’t contain “The Moves”, which are derived from Magic in the Mirror — MiM — in order to handle the coins efficiently and effectively. I’ll assume that the coins are already separated out into decades. If not, they’ll have to be separated out before beginning a search, because you can only compare coins with other coins of the same decade, when grading, or you’ll get entirely baffled by the sudden changes in quality, so the general rule is ALWAYS SEARCH BY DECADE.
So, you’ve got a bag of TEENS, TWENTIES, THIRTIES, FORTIES or FIFTIES coins. Let’s begin a search on them. Put the bag nearby on the floor or on a very strong table.
Now all that remains is to store the tubes in boxes until they are needed. I’ll now do a step-by-step rundown on how to handle the coins from search to sale: Continue reading
Okay, you have a bag of “wheaties”, which means a bag of Lincoln Wheat-Ear Back One Cent pieces from one of three U.S. mints — Philadelphia, Denver and San Francisco.
Of the three, you could always count on the mint in San Francisco to develop lots of mint errors, notably involving the mint-mark.
In the Philadelphia coins, there are no mint-marks, but on the other hand, there are lots of opportunities to strike it rich with DDOs, which is to say, “Doubled-Die Obverse” errors, which means that the die got struck twice during the creation of the die from the HUB — it’s all very complicated, but you can find out about the process by reading the Mega Red coin book, which I think you’ll find surprisingly good reading, if you’re at all interested in the history of the coins and the mints that made them AND the horses they rode in on!
You’re dealing here with circulation coins, not special coins issued by the mint to make money for the politicians, such as the “proof sets” and “eagles” and special issue “collectible” gold coins, and other equally miserable excuses for collectibles.
If you mark something as “collectible” and everybody collects them and keeps them totally intact and pristine and mint-condition, guess what? They’re not collectible at all, because scarcity is a powerful driver in the collectibles market, and that’s just not there when everybody has one. Continue reading
Okay, here’s my entry into the coinology marketing field:
It’s a packet, pouch, box or clear bag with a bunch of ordinary wheaties pennies — a carefully calculated mix of teens, twenties and thirties Lincoln Wheat cents.
Please note that I have avoided the nicer-looking but generally worthless later Lincoln cents, the forties and fifties. You can buy them by the shovelful in mint condition for very little, so why muck about looking for and through them for the coins you really want?
My thought is that the price would be slightly different for a bag of 1910’s, 1920’s and 1930’s pennies, but like a crackerjack box, each bag is GUARANTEED to contain at least one, and sometimes two or three, PREMIUM COINS. Continue reading
What is a “Gorby’s Penny-Picker Cash Cow”, and why would I want one?
Okay, fair question, and here’s the best answer I can give you at the moment — a Penny Picker Cash Cow is a fair booth. Of course, it can be applied anywhere, in a store, apartment or traveling bus.
First of all, don’t bother to register the concept — it’s not new, but it might be new to you, which is, technically, new.
So, of what precisely does a Penny Picker Cash Cow consist?
First of all, shouldn’t you be asking whether this Cash Cow is a Work Thing or a Business Thing?
Well, it’s both. You earn a livelihood from your Bodhisattva work, and it takes several very specific forms — obtaining coins, sorting coins, searching coins, grading coins, packaging coins, selling coins and teaching coin search to others.
When you send in your $450, I buy a bag of wheaties and search them to cherry-pick anything EF and above, and put those in a different container. The lesser quality coins are placed in your “Search Bag” or “Go Fish Bowl” in your fair booth or shop or waiting room. Continue reading
Most silver half dollars run from about $35 for something decent all the way down to crap coins at $8 bucks apiece, if you don’t mind the fact that the coin is unrecognizable and basically worth the silver scrap price and not a lot more.
Even cheaper is the half dollar you get from your local grocer or bank clerk. You’ll need a half dollar in order to learn the very first trick a performing magician learns, which is called “The French Drop”.
The French Drop is the Very First Trick You’ll Ever Learn, if you learn from a pro, and learning The French Drop requires a specific and very serious and very official Initiation into the Order of Performing Magicians.
I’ll give specifics in a moment, but first, let’s examine the concept of coin magic itself:
One of the most natural and easiest tricks for which to find a prop is a coin trick. Almost everyone has a coin of some kind or another. The most common coin for the French Drop is the U.S. Half Dollar, but there are plenty of other coins and plenty of good reasons to use an unusual coin. Continue reading