Registry Set Ideas

MANY YEARS AGO in my coin collecting life, I came to a momentous decision: I would concentrate my efforts on key coins and gold. Care to guess how long I stuck to this plan?

You’re right, I couldn’t do it for long. There were too many other coins that weren’t either key dates or gold that I found attractive, and I soon got sidetracked by the desire to assemble Registry Sets of Washington quarters, Peace dollars, Carson City Morgan dollars, and so on. I’ll have more to say about Registry Sets later.

Although I’ve tended to think of my coin collecting more as a hobby than an investment, like other collectors I like to see my collection appreciate in value. Thus, I decided to focus on gold coins and key coins (generally the scarcest and most expensive coins in a series), because these are the coins that seemed to me to have held their value and/or appreciated relative to other coins.

In line with this thinking, I decided to see how many different Saint-Gaudens double eagles ($20 gold pieces) I could accumulate before prices exceeded my budget