AS I’M writing this, Christmas is rapidly approaching. When that’s over, the New Year will be upon us. Among other things, the New Year reminds me of resolutions, the promise of changes we’ll make to improve our lives.
Perhaps you’ll vow to finally start exercising or eating right or losing weight. Of course, these changes are interrelated. There may be other changes you desire that are unrelated. There may even be resolutions that you ought to make that you haven’t even considered.
For example, do you have some coins? Do you consider yourself more of an accumulator of coins, or a collector of them? If the latter, where do you reside in the pantheon of collectors? That is, are you a beginner, middle-level collector, or an advanced collector, perhaps even a numismatist?
From my lengthy experience advising people about what to do with coins they’ve inherited, I’ve learned that many collections don’t really fit that label. They’re more accumulations of coins than actual collections.
In the 4th edition of, Beth Deisher discussed three levels of coin collectors: accumulators, casual collectors, and numismatists. Accumulators are apt to have large numbers of coins, some with bullion value because
