What got you started with collecting coins?

Hey everyone, you probably read this question a few times here already but I'm still curious. If you're interested, here's my story 🙂
 

When I was a kid, I used to collect Pokemon cards, rocks and minerals so no coins at all. I spent lots of time at my grandparent's home though where they gave me a tiny film canister filled with modern German pfennigs to play with.
 

I forgot about the coins for about 10 years (which was 5 years ago) until I found them again when helping my grandparents to clean their house. They gave me the coins as a gift so guess what I did with them? Right, I sold them on eBay for 5 bucks 😂 The story isn't over though.
 

With these 5 bucks I bought a coin lot and in there I found an indian Tanka (small but heavy hammered coin made of a copper-lead alloy) and a british silver Shilling minted under George VI. They got me started with collecting.
 

First I went for big coins like british Pennies or spanish 100 Pesetas coins so really nothing special. Then I switched to swedish, american, german and swiss silver coins but it got more like hoarding instead of collecting so I sold the entire collection too.
 

Now I stick with a small collection of ancient silver coins that weigh around 3 grams like denarii or drachms. I don't go for certain themes but only types and coins that I like. Completing a collection before felt more like an obligation instead of a fun experience so I just get what I like without any certain goal.

My story is very short and simple.

When I was 13 years old or so, I used to go to the local British Legion building with my dad and one day, a friend of my dads got an American ½ dollar in his change instead of a 2 Shilling (florin) coin, and he gave it to me, and I still have it.

When I was young my grandfather gifted me a 1964 Proof and Mint set as well as the 1984 olympic silver dollar set since I was born in 1984.  I did not understand the significance of the 1964 coins until much later in life.   Like many boys my age I didn't see the value in coins and thought that I wanted videogames more. So I traded or sold them.

Fast forward about a decade or so and My grandmother passed away.  In the lot of stuff I got from her was an envelope of my grandfathers belongings and inside that was some of his paper notes that he brought back from Germany after the war.  I tucked them away in an envelope for about another decade until I was given a few silver rounds in an exchange for a debt on some photography work.  Seeing those rounds got me feeling nostolgic about my grandfather and how he used to hoard silver. I  decided that I wanted to get those original mint sets back and that led me down the rabbit hole of collecting mint sets, proof sets, then eventually picked back up where I left off on Quarters when I was young and too impatient to wait for each new state to release.  I would also pick up any coin/silver rounds that I could find that had an interesting motif. 

I decided that I wanted to find out what all those paper notes were, and thats when I discovered numista.  I also around this time picked up about 2 lbs bulk world coins and had no idea what to do with them.  I have a nephew and neice who both showed interest in coins so we picked through the bag sorting out any coins with animals and put them aside.  Every week or so the kids come over and we identify and label the animals and I print up labels for the zoo album. 

I think the big driving factor for me now is just the swapping and community here on the site. I have been enjoying making swaps for some of my quarters and getting new animals.  :)

But I'm not very knowledgeable yet in a lot of the hobby so I've just started branching out and trying to figure out what exactly I'd like to collect outside of a few motifs. 

Hi everyone,

My grandfather was a filatelist (he had a very interesting and quite evaluable collection of Chile, Peru and Germany). He also had a little amount of mixed coins, not real a collection, mostly 19th century silver from Chile.

With these “old” coins we -my brother and me- were allowed to play “grocery” Chile our grandfather was sorting and enyoing his stamps.

When grandpa passed away, the coins were given to me by my grandmother. 

In the meantime, my father had bought some peruvian silver Soles as a gift for a friend in Germany, who was a numismatist; but in the hurry before the flight he forgot to put them in his luggage.

When he came back home after some weeks, he asked me to help him investigate about this coins; we got interested in the history they coins would tell, he bought our first peruvian catalogue,  and finaly we merged his forgotten peruvian coins with my grandpa's chilean coins: that was the beginning of over 50 years of collecting Chile and Perú.

Regards.

Around 1960, my mother had a good friend who inherited a substantial coin collection after her husband died. The widow had no idea how to deal with it, so my mother offered to catalogue, appraise and sell off the collection, which took 2-3 years. 

I remember one time she returned from a trip to a Boston dealer, and pulled out a silver dollar to show us. I don't remember the date, except it was an early bust type. She then pulled out a Morgan dollar, and proceeded to ‘ping’ them both.

“Can you tell the difference?” she asked.

Indeed we could. The first coin was counterfeit. My brother and I thought that was pretty cool, but mother was not happy. She told us what it would have been worth had it been genuine.

The widow insisted that mother receive some compensation, so at the end, she took whatever the dealers didn't want.

Although mother died several years ago, I'm only this year starting to catalogue her collection. I dare say I'm getting as much enjoyment from it as she did with the original collection.

I'm also enjoying this thread!

When I was 8 me and my brother did professional ice skating (figure skating), it was at this age I got lazy and wanted to switch to ice hockey so instead of practicing I spoke to one of the older ice dancers, we spoke about my love of Titanic and world war 2 and I had been studying both since I was 4 and 6 respectively, he told me about coin collecting but I didn't know where to start with it.

A few days later he brought me in some coins, a Victoria veil head penny, a 1930s farthing and a George the 5th penny. Long story short i got hooked on to it, now 10 years later, i just turned 18 almost 2 months ago, I have over 4000 coins, a piece of a deck chair recovered from Titanic, thousands of coins and other historical items going as far back as the formation of the solar system. 

My 2 first purchases with my credit card were a gift for my amazing girlfriend and my very first NGC graded coin from the El Cazador shipwreck!

when I was eight in 1963 my mother gave me 6d to get some sweets, in the change was an Irish free state penny and it started my fascination with coins. I began collecting all the penny and hail penny variants I could find in circulation but my collection really took off when my brother joined the army and brought me coins from all the countries he visited, then in 1968 the very first decimal coins appeared in circulation and I vowed to collect every circulation decimal coin that was released. Then in 1970 I joined the Royal Navy and of course my collection increased rapidly as I travelled the world and had the funds to buy coins that I wanted, now I am 70 and still as avid about collecting as I was in those long distant years from my past. One momentous occasion was during the south Atlantic war in 1982, I was treating the wounds of an injured Argentine soldier and we started talking about home, he told me that he was a coin collector and asked if I had any spare British coins for his collection, we became friends and still exchange letters to this day and send each other coins from our countries. 

When I was a kid, I walked through the site of a building that had been demolished.  In amongst the rubble I found an old UK penny with the date 1900 on it, which must have been set in the foundation. I couldn't believe that I was holding something that was 90 years old (yes, I'm that old)  it led to me collecting pieces of history: coins, stamps, postcards, etc.  Anything that gives a glimpse of the past.

My story is quite similar, just one coin started my collection.

My father worked in Genova's harbour, and one day when I was seven years old, he found a small Norwegian coin with a hole and gifted it to me. I was very interested and began collecting foreign coins. 

This happened 60 years ago. At that time, it was hard to get coins from abroad. There was an exchange shop in Genoa's downtown that had a basket with coins. Whenever it was possible, I visited it and spent my “allowance” in coins.

Then, I started pestering anyone going abroad for foreign coins.

The collection was growing at a very slow pace. The catalogue was a ring binder notebook.

Later I got a job giving me a lot of change to travel abroad, as well as to my colleagues: so many chances to add coins to the collection.

Internet was a big boster. I started to swap, initially using mailing lists of collectors found on the web, then Yahoo groups, … the social media, and finally Numista.

The catalogue moved to a Word document, then a simple database for the Mac, then Excel, and finally everything is on Numista. BTW, I bought several editions of the KM catalogue.

Year after year, I had the problem of keeping the size of the collection manageable, so that I could store it properly.

Initially, I collected coins from any country, including Italy, by year, but only circulating coins.

At a certain point I decided to collect by type.

Later, I restricted myself to coins from 1900 onward.

The arrival of the Euro, and the considerable number of 2 Euro commemorative coins drove me to further restrict coins up to 2000.

So now I am collecting the “last century”, any circulating coins from 1900 till 2000. 

My story is quite similar, just one coin started my collection.

My father worked in Genova's harbour, and one day when I was seven years old, he found a small Norwegian coin with a hole and gifted it to me. I was very interested and began collecting foreign coins. 

This happened 60 years ago. At that time, it was hard to get coins from abroad. There was an exchange shop in Genoa's downtown that had a basket with coins. Whenever it was possible, I visited it and spent my “allowance” in coins.

Then, I started pestering anyone going abroad for foreign coins.

The collection was growing at a very slow pace. The catalogue was a ring binder notebook.

Later I got a job giving me a lot of change to travel abroad, as well as to my colleagues: so many chances to add coins to the collection.

Internet was a big boster. I started to swap, initially using mailing lists of collectors found on the web, then Yahoo groups, … the social media, and finally Numista.

The catalogue moved to a Word document, then a simple database for the Mac, then Excel, and finally everything is on Numista. BTW, I bought several editions of the KM catalogue.

Year after year, I had the problem of keeping the size of the collection manageable, so that I could store it properly.

Initially, I collected coins from any country, including Italy, by year, but only circulating coins.

At a certain point I decided to collect by type.

Later, I restricted myself to coins from 1900 onward.

The arrival of the Euro, and the considerable number of 2 Euro commemorative coins drove me to further restrict coins up to 2000.

So now I am collecting the “last century”, any circulating coins from 1900 till 2000. 

Greetings from Ukraine!
My journey into collecting began quite unexpectedly. At first, coins were just a way to teach my daughter how to count. And funnily enough — when you give kids candies or toys, math doesn’t go so well, but when coins appear — a little miracle happens.

Later, we moved on to geography: sorting coins by countries and continents. Then came history, where commemorative issues were especially helpful.

As time passed, my daughter grew up, and I, unfortunately, became disabled because of the war. My legs no longer walk, but my hands and mind still work just fine. That’s when I rediscovered coins. This hobby pulled me in so deeply that now it takes up almost all of my free time.

Besides collecting itself, I’m also fascinated by related things: how to store coins properly, how to photograph them, which software to use for cataloging, and I even run my own website dedicated to numismatics. I’m also planning to start a YouTube channel. One day, I’d love to learn how to earn from this passion — but for now, it brings me joy rather than income 😊.

Wishing everyone peace and kindness!

My story has been posted on other forums and posts before and is quite long. There were basically 2 phases to my coin collecting, adult and child. In a halfshell the adult one started around 2011 when I was buying and onselling coins online for two old ladies at a church/mission shop and making a bit of cash on the side. Around 2019, I stopped selling everything and started keeping it and then specialised into UK old coins, NZ coins, silver and all the rest with the gold and bullion.

But here I will mention the kiddy collection and that is because several of your stories involve Britannia pennies and I am coincedentally writing a thread about them on this forum now too. It seems these coins were the entry point for a lot of us, me included. I was around 8 or 9 in 1985 and whilst playing at some friends place, his mother gave me an old milk jug and told me to look at her old coins whilst my friend had to do some chore that could not wait. It was fascinating, coins from all over the world (Mostly modern change and being 1985, this would be mostly 60s and 70s) but there were a few older coins in there and I wanted to find the oldest and it was a manky old Britannia penny from about 1898 or 1899 or something. I had so much fun, she said I keep one coin and of course it was that penny. Something about it fascinated me, learning about history at school and reading books about the “olden days” fascinated me and having a coin from that time was cream on the cake. I found a Christmas card from 1985 and it was actually to my parents from me, various fowls (We had chooks), our dog and “Granma the old penny”.

Granma - likely looked like a more worn version of the coin on the left.

I probably had it for years and got a few more coins over the years. By 1988 I had about 20 coins with the penny of course, I think there was an American quarter, some NZ pennies and the best was a 1948 Halfcrown and 1942S USA quarter (Silver). In early 1989, my Mum took me into town and bought me a packet of 50 world wide coins for like $10 from a local coin shop and this was fascinating. I was collecting stamps and getting into the coins. My parents had friends who travelled and were more than happy to give me their change coins. By 1991 aged almost 15 I had around 250 coins in a wooden box and I decided to save pocket money and get serious, buying my first lot of proper coins, being a complete set of silver NZ threepences from 1933 - 1946 (Except the rare 1935) and they cost like $12 or something, a lot of money when you get $5 a week pocket money. Over 1991, 92 , 93 I added more NZ coins, so I had most of the old NZ and had started deep into the UK. Of course all were like the cheapest condition (Good or VG), but later I got more sophisticated and started buying better coins like silver crowns, Morgans, florins etc in 1997 - 1999 as I entered my 20s. But then in 2001 I had my coin collection stolen out of my car in the rural north island when I was moving and the shock hurt me so much (The penny would have been amongst it), it scared me off collecting again until the 2010s. Now of course all of my better coins are photographed, insured, listed and recorded. I know everything i own, when I bought it, what I paid for it and how much its worth. I also have all my gold and bullion stored in a vault. 

No way in 1985, did I think that penny would lead to a collection worth around $250,000 some 40 years later.