Auctions ,And Finding Silver, Gold and Gems and How to Sell Them

By Mr. Joel Goodwin

I am 57 year old native Virginian whose family came here in the early 1600s. I have collected since my early teens from a mostly rural area where many would think there would not be a lot of collecting possible but I found that not to be true. There is a link between collecting an addiction but is is just the thrill of finding each and every piece that you can. For years I seldom sold a piece but when I did I found that same thrill for the second time. It was not unusual to sell a piece for four or five times what I had paid. From my history loving family I have had a lot of help as they will often tell me what they have seen so that I can go back and make a deal on it. My wife now goes out once or twice a week to help me and often ended up selling as well. The selling part is important as it enables me to collect pieces I would never sell without taking away money from our family budget. It has become a lifestyle which has goes into everyday life as well as I try to get the best deal on everything. Now if I could only bargain on the gas bill or the water bill my life would be complete.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 24, 2013
• ISBN: 9781479764174

Book preview

Auctions, and Finding

Silver, Gold and Gems

and how to Sell Them

Mr. Joel Goodwin

Copyright © 2013 by Mr. Joel Goodwin.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,

without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Contents

Foreword

Chapter 1 A brief history

Chapter 2 Start up money for free

Chapter 3 The different venues

Chapter 4 What to buy, where and when

Chapter 5 Frauds, Fakes and repos

Prologue

I must dedicate this to my wife for putting up with me and my two children, Chris and Nicole who now think Dad might not be crazy after all. And to my Mom and Dad and my Grandfather who taught me

to take care of the things one accumulates in life.

Foreword

I am lucky to be doing what I do now although near tragedy is what got me here. I worked in other fields for more than thirty years almost all of which was heavy industry. That is where I nearly ended my life. After being injured severely I stuck with it another eight years un till I could no longer do the work. Collecting had been a serious hobby of mine since I was a teenager and it did not require me to do physical work. I had run businesses on the side of my regular job since the 80s out of my home. All of a sudden I was faced with lots of time on my hands but the prospect of living on a fixed income.

What to do? There were parts of my collections that I would never sell but others meant less to me. All those years collecting I had been very concerned about prices, whether buying at auction or from an individual and had always stuck to a limit that was meant to provide me an excellent profit margin should the time arise to sell some items. As I had found out in my business there were those who would pay full or near full book prices for pieces in excellent condition. It was not long before I was selling in severel venues from trade papers to local papers to the inter net. I have realized some excellent prices, some might say quite shameful even. All of a sudden here I am enjoying selling almost as much as collecting. But what really got me going was the finding of pieces to collect or to sell. It was much as one might imagine finding treasure is like.

Come and join me and have fun while you make money!

J.P. Goodwin

Chapter 1

A brief history

I guess I was born to be a collector although I did not know it untill my teenage years. My mothers father came to town during the great depression. When he got here he was looking for land to buy. There was another who also was looking for land and the two were both shown fairly large parcels for town. My grandfather bought overgrown farm land overlooking the town and the other guy bought the most undesirable parcel in town with a tannery next to it and a dump across the road. This was one of my first lessons in buying and selling. Grandad got his good deal as noone else was buying but the other guy soon to be our town banker ended up making millions on his terrible property. Grandad said that looks can sometimes be decieving and you have to weigh all the options when making a perchase. He lacked the future vision of the banker but he alwasys seemed happy with it. Our whole family ended up building on the property over the years and there is still only family today 80 years later.

Even though all the family seemed to have good jobs we all insisted on doing everthing ourselves. This included building our homes all of which are still beautiful. My father and my Grandad both taught me carpentry, the masons trade and electrical and plumbing. As a preteen I would go out on constuction jobs with my father which he took on outside his regular work. I learned a lot by the doing and uppermost was quality of the work. This experience taught me the value of hard work and that sweat equity was a way to build value on your own home.

In my teen years I was conflicted with deciding on girls or just working and making money. I soon learned that with girls you are going to need money. Since we had a lot of fruit trees with more fruit than we could use I was given the oppurtunity of picking and selling the excess as noone else seemed to want to do it. In good years I would sell hundreds of quarts of cherries and damsons and bushels of peaches. Grandad used to show me his old coins that he had kept despite the depression and soon I was looking through the change I was paid with and thus my collection was begun. Grandad would even take me down to the bank, yes the same guys bank who bought the bad land and he took a liking to me and would let me go into the vault, and show me some of the coins he had collected. He told me how at quiting time he would go thru the bank drawers looking for collectable coins. He said a collector has to take advantage of every chance he gets to futher his collection. He also stressed the fact that one should when buying buy the very best quality he can afford. Everything I had learned had stressed quality and pride in workmanship. This would serve me well in life in not just collecting but everthing I did.

When I married my highschool sweatheart and got a good job it wasnt very long before I wanted a house of my own. In a few short years we had saved enough to get started and I bough land from my father and mother. I had designed a house of some 2400 square feet and four bedrooms. I had some help in getting started and along the way with even my wife carring things I didnt think she should be carring. I had the house under roof before I ever went to the bank and got any money from a home loan. Twenty years was the length and we ended up paying that off early. With a home and a family and more local contracters than you could shake a stick at doing construction work outside my job was not very feasible so I took a different route. I feel back on quality work and my salesmanship and opened a gunsmithing and gun sales shop. Demand was fairly brisk and it was not long before I took my sales on the road to gun shows. I sold more than I ever imagined I could and still I was looking for more ways to branch out. I negotiated a deal with the manager of a sporting club run by a five star hotel to buy and sell their once fired shotshell hulls to reloaders. I had some idea that this would be a good deal but I did not think I would be shipping them to Europe or asia which I did. After 12 years of running the buisness I decided to go back to college while retaining my position for a major corporation and that left no time for the buisness or anything else for that matter.

All through the eighties and the ninetys I continue to collect my coins and even branched out a bit into other areas. I was a regular at all the local auctions and I paid attention to what was going on around me and learned who was my competion and some ways to aviod having them cost me more money than I was willing to pay. From the mid eighties on I had been in the quality control department at my employer and had tested and and been responsible for visual inspection of product before it went to the customer. This in turn made me take a much closer look at anything I bought or bid on at an auction. There is nothing worse than paying at or near top dollar for aa particular piece only to find out later that it has been repaired or the fit and finish is not what you thought it to be. If you have never been to an auction one thing you will find is a printed message to you that all items are sold as is where is and that is your warning to look closely. One of the things I could never understand was those people who would bid on something having never left their seats to inspect the piece and then often paying more than full retail price for something. But you will find all kinds of people at auctions.

When auctions were not enough to satisfy my collecting I started to go to every yard sale and estate sale I could find within a resonable distance. This was the roaring ninetys with the take off of the net and money flowing freely and I even began to travel some distance to auctions if the overall auction seemed to be of high quiality. This was one hell of a learning experience with the general lack of knowledge of yard sellers to the new buyers I had