Buying and Selling Coins Guide

Coin Guide – Buying and Selling Coins – Coin Flip

Introduction.

In today’s blog, we are going to cover all aspects of dealing with buying and selling coins. From simply buying a single coin to sell for a profit all the way to the other end of the scale to the scrap values of worn or damaged coins.

Where to buy coins?

Where you buy your coins will depend on a number of variables. Ask yourself, are you a collector or a dealer? Why are you interested in buying and selling coins? Why is this important? If you’re a collector you’re more likely to try to buy just the coins you need whereas a dealer will buy job lots and break it up to make the most money they can. Now I am not saying a collector can’t or doesn’t buy job lots also. I know many collectors who buy jobs lots of coins, then take out the coins they wanted and sell the rest for their money back meaning their collection comes in for free or just a little bit of work.

I have been dealing with buying and selling coins in the UK for over twenty years. I am not a coin specialist but in this blog, I am going to share all my tips and secrets with you in order to help you maximize as much profit as you can from buying and selling coins.

As a collector, you are in a position to pay more for your coins. Buying and selling silver coins and any other coins can be profitable. Also, buying and selling coins are available on online shopping sites like eBay. Online shops can be a good coin market and at the same time, it connects buyers and sellers across the world. Because of this marketing strategy with the help of technology, you can find and buy cheap coins in the UK or find your currency buyers and dealers. You can also go to auctions or coin fairs and see specialist dealers at antique fairs and be selective. If this is the case, make sure to buy the best example of a coin or the best coins to buy and sell in the UK you can afford.

If you are like me who is looking at coins as a wage maker, then your options are so much greater. I try to buy all my coins in bulk if I can when I am at antique fairs or flea markets all the way to car boot sales. I see someone selling cheap bulk coins. The first thing I do is try to buy them all. The reason for this is the price is always much lower than if they sell them singly.

I go to car boot sales and flea markets and I dig in boxes of junk, I look through button boxes looking for loose coins, and I have found sovereigns hidden in with old buttons on many occasions. If I go to an auction for a coin market, I try to stay away from the single coins as they have been singled out and highlighted to everyone. This means that they are more likely to pull a stronger price. Instead, buy the job lot of mixed coins. Online bidding is available online if you can not attend auctions. My advice for you if you intend to bid online on job lots of coins would be to go to higher-end auctions. Why? It is because larger auction houses can be rare coin wholesalers and tend to focus more on sovereigns and Krugerrand or rare coins where the money is. They are less likely to spend the time it takes to go through a job lot of coins taking the silver coins out.

I have bought many single coins and sold them on for a profit countless times, so I am not saying you can not do that. If you do your homework and know what you are buying, you can make some good money from buying and selling coins, buying and selling silver coins for profit, and it is so much less work to just sell a single coin. I am just saying that job lots are a safe way to make some really good money.

When looking to buy a bucket or job lot of coins, the first thing I do is quickly sift through it to check if they have removed the silver coins. If we look at British coins as an example, we are looking for silver coins that pre-date 1946. if you see multiple silver coins the odds are that the seller is not a coin dealer and has not removed the silver coins, and that is the type of job lot you want to buy.

What to look for?

As an example, I have bought buckets of coins five and ten kilos of coins for £50 to £100 from rare coin wholesalers. Then you have to take them home and sift through them. This can take hours but it is well worth the effort. The first thing you are going to do is to look for any gold and silver coins and remove them. ( I will give you a breakdown of the silver content in a bit below ).

The next thing to do is to sift through the coins and separate them all, firstly checking grades. If you are a coin buyer you have to know if the coins are high-grade coins then they may be worth selling on their own so they go in one pile to be identified and valued later. Remember that a coin seller must be responsible for their coin buyers’ satisfaction. If your coins are very worn then they are likely to have little to no value at all as a coin. However, this does not mean they are worthless. Here is a bucket of Victorian pennies I bought at a car boot sale for £15 recently,

There are just over ten kilos of pennies. I haven’t gone through them yet to look for low mintage years or rare minting stamps. Let’s assume there are no coins of value in there and with ten kilos of coins will be rare you are going to find a few at least. An old penny is made of copper. Copper at the moment of writing this blog is about £5 per kilo so just as a scrap value this bucket is worth £50. when you scrap something you don’t need to sell it. There is no haggling the current metal value is what you get paid for, you just go to your smelters or scrap yard and they will put them on the scales and pay you out.

What Can I Scrap?

Scrap prices are determined by the stock market and fluctuate every hour of every day. There is also a difference between the spot or stock market price and the scrap price that a smelter will pay you.

For example, the spot price as of July 2020 is approx £0.47 per gram. Yet the smelters I use are paying between £0.35 and £0.40 per gram. So please be careful when you are working out your prices. Find a good bullion smelters/dealers and work on the price they will pay you. It is very important that you trust your smelters/scrap man, I have dealt with a company called Bowjangles in Wednesbury UK, as an example they display their prices online every day so I know if I want a profit on scrapping I need to be buying below what they will pay me and not the spot price.

Again looking mainly at British coins you have sovereigns which are 22ct gold, you have crowns, half-crowns, two shillings, a shilling, a sixpence, and threepence if pre-1946 contain silver you have pennies, halfpennies, farthing that are made from copper. Later you have three pence made from brass which again can be weighed in.

What’s it worth? At the moment of writing this blog in 2020

What’s it worth? At the moment of writing this blog in 2020, we are looking at the scrap value. Any good coin can be sold to a coin market or coin buyers for greater than the scrap value however the scrap price is for any coin on any date in any condition just the metal value to melt.

In July 2020 the current price I am offered at buying and selling coins in the UK for 22ct gold is £40 per gram so to work out the value of the gold coins below it requires a simple calculation. 8 grams multiply by £40 = a full sovereign is £320 to melt. ( Weight times price ) so as long as you pay less than £320 you have an easy profit.

A full Sovereign 8 grams 22ct gold
Half Sovereign 4 grams 22ct gold
Third Guinea weighs 2.8 grams 22ct
Half Guinea weight 4.2 grams 22ct
A full Guinea weight of 8.3 grams 22ct

British silver coins. If coins date between 1920 – 1946 they are of 500-grade silver so only half the weight is silver in the coin market. If they are 1919 or earlier then they are sterling silver. To work out the price of the half-grade silver as a rough figure ( not exact ) just weigh the coins and half it before you multiply by the current silver price. This buying and selling silver coins strategy will definitely move your profit.

Silver scrap ( not spot ) price in July 2020 is £0.40 per gram so as above 28 grams times £0.40 means a crown is a worth £11.20 scrap, again prices change daily.

Crown weight 28.2 grams

Half Crown Weight 14.1 grams

Two Shillings ( florin ) weight 11.3 grams

One shilling weight 5.5 grams

Sixpence weight 2.7 grams

Groat / Fourpence 1.9 grams

Threepence weight 1.3 grams

Copper coins are Two pence, one penny, half pence, and farthing. Copper is a non-ferrous metal and is worth about £500 a ton or £5 a kilo in the coin market. Now, as an example, you are looking at around 106 Victorian 1p coins to make a kilo but when you buy them buy the bucket full and a lot are faceless/worn all you need to do is throw them in another bucket for saving and when you weigh them in at the end of the year you will be shocked how fast the kilos add up.

So once you have taken out the coins worth selling as a single coin, you have taken out all the scrap coins you are left with, a lot of coins maybe British or even mixed world mixed metal or even modern coins, what I do then, I make sure that there are no foreign silver coins or rare foreign coins. I have an amazing book of world coins which tells you when every country stopped using silver in their coins ( ISBN 079482056-5) I would suggest you get this book. This book will not only show you what the coins are made of up to a certain year but if you have Persian coins or other coins that you can not read you can match the images and check for rare coins. As an example you look at the best Palestine coins to buy and sell in the UK, the mills, demand a really good price. So make sure to identify every single coin in the bucket, anything you can not identify put aside or I guarantee you will make a mistake and dump something worth money.

Once you have exhausted all areas’ precious metal, rare coins, foreign coins, and scrap metal coins, you are left with worthless mostly modern mixed metal coins. What do you do with them?

Well, I will tell you. Anything like that I weigh up and sell on eBay per kilo of mixed world coins and I ask £12 per kilo for the lot and normally end up with £10 a kilo. Which I will pay most for job lots that contain silver etc.

This is how buying and selling coins on eBay works.

Any coins that you found to be in good condition when you first sifted through the job lot need to be identified and valued. An easy way to get an idea of prices once you identify the coin using the book shown above is to go to the sold list on eBay and look at the average prices, it is very rare to have a coin that has not been sold on eBay. So prices are easily available. But please check the sold prices not asking prices and look for the best coins to buy and sell in the UK. eBay is also a very good platform to sell your single coins if you have no other outlet such as a website. Another good platform would be facebook coins groups where you have access to collectors.

If you follow this simple guide you are as safe as you can be. The chances of losing money when buying and selling silver coins and other coins for profit are slim to nil. I would like to remind you that the prices change daily or even hourly for gold. Make sure to allow enough margin/profit that if the price goes down before you can get to weigh the coins in then you are safe. And remember if you hold/hoard your metals you have the chance of the metal value going up but at the same time it can also go down.

If you would like to watch a film I made on youtube talking about buying cheap coins in the UK, buying and selling silver coins for profit, and the best coins to buy and sell in the UK topic. I also showed some job lots I bought. Please click the link opposite.