Do you remember?

When you first got started in coin collecting? For me it was nine no-date buffalo nickels and a handful of wheat pennies in a zip-lock bag that my father gave me. The coins I was given interested me and I wanted to know more about old coins, and let's just say I got my first Red Book at a thrift store and then it started. I studied that 2004 edition book for days on end, night and day. And retained that information to the point that I was called ''the walking coin encyclopedia'' by my family members, and still do. But now I have moved from zip-lock bags to albums, binders, small metal boxes, and a secure double lock army trunk (the same one I found my first silver coin in) to hold it all. All over a one and a half year period.

When did you get your first silver coin? My first was a double holed 1944 Philippines twenty centavos. I found it in an army trunk of mine. I saw it and wondered what it was, and I got it out and looked it up on Numista. That is also how I found this website.

So how about you, how did you get started? I would love to hear your story. Thanks.

Started collecting when I was appx 4, got interested by the Canadian circ commems...
first coin book - Charlston Standard 2006 for Canadian coins
first silver coin... a rlly crappy walking Liberty half...
found Numista because it's more friendly than coincommunity
First *collectable* banknote - when I was 5    it was a 70's 1 dollar bill. I have no idea where it is now..........  

Starting Collecting coins 6 years ago, when I was in grade 8 and I had to do a project on Ireland. I in charge of economy so I brought in money.
First coin book - Standard Catalog of World Coins
First Silver Coin - Canadian dime I got in change
I found Numista after being on colnect for a couple years and I was looking for something better.
First "collectable" banknote - 5 Euro banknote

When I was about ten years old (circa 1990), my father gave me a small handful of unusual coins he'd found in his pocket change over the years.  (Dad has also been a lifelong nickel collector since his childhood.)  The coins he gave me contained wheat cents, Canadian coins, some German pfennig, and a few Caribbean coins from the Bahamas, Bermuda, and the Cayman Islands.  Included among them were my first silver coins, a 1963 Canada dime and a 1951 Canada quarter.  I set these coins aside, and added to it any old American coins I came across or Canadian coin that sneak south of the border.

In 1992 I added a silver round to my collection, a coin which I have been unable to locate in Numista's catalog.  It's design is a modified Peace dollar, without a date or face value and the text 99.99% FINE SILVER ONE TROY OUNCE added to the reverse.  I won this coin at school during a Valentine's Day contest.

I traveled to the UK and Ireland for three weeks in the summer of 1995.  This was with a US government program called People To People.  The experience was somewhere between being a tourist and being an exchange student.  I brought back a handful of UK and Irish decimal coins, but only the Irish 50p remains with me to this day.

In 1998, I got my first permanent job at an Arby's restaurant a few miles from home.  I'd worked previous summers, but the Arby's gig was the first job I'd held that wasn't strictly seasonal.  I'd keep random pocket change with me so I could swap out for any cool coins I found in the register drawers.  The coolest coin I found this way was a 1995 Vatican 200 lire.   Eight thousand coins later, this is still the only Vatican coin I own.

I left for college in 2000, to attend a small engineering school just outside New York City.  My daily usage of cash dwindled to nothing, and I didn't have a chance to find coins in my pocket change, nor did I have the time or cash to build my collection.  Indeed, my "collecting" habits at this time were largely dormant.  I do recall one particular foreign coin I found during my college years.  I was visiting Times Square in Manhattan in the autumn of 2000.  While waiting to cross the street, I looked down, spied a dime, pocketed it, and continued on my way.  Only later, when my group ducked into a record store, did I have time to inspect my find... a 1999 jiao from China.

In 2002 I discovered a new avenue for finding coins... geocaching!  My dad introduced me to this cute little GPS hobby.  Foreign coins are commonly used as trade trinkets in caches, and I quickly amassed specimens from Western Europe and the British Commonwealth.

In time I graduated and moved to Washington DC.  I found an Iraqi coin in my apartment's parking lot on the very week I moved here.  I got a job downtown, and took the Metro trains to work each day.  I stumbled across a 1944 wheat cent on the train, and went online to look up its mintage.  At that moment, the dormant collector within me finally awakened!

I signed up on WCG and started entering my small collection.  I discovered a number of coin collector blogs and read them diligently.  I started an Excel Spreadsheet to document my collection.  I joined a metal detectorist forum and read about the strategies of coin roll hunting.  The roll hunters were having their best luck with half dollars, so I started to order boxes of halves from my bank.  Half dollars have not really circulated in everyday American commerce for over 15 years, and hidden in the mountains of unwanted dollars that build up in bank vaults are the silver halves from before 1971.  I continued to roll hunt through half dollars for a few years, finding a few dozen silver Franklins and Kennedys and putting together a full set of clad JFKs (sans 1987 and post-2001, of course).  My half dollar collection was the crown jewel of my hobby at that point.  Around 2010, I decided that the rewards weren't worth the time and effort, and left half hunting behind.

The DC area is a very international place, fertile and fruitful grounds for foreign coins.  I encountered foreign coins in banks, supermarkets, food courts, and parking lots.  UK, Eurozone, Chile, Australia, Bolivia, Vietnam, Ethiopia, Trinidad and Tobago, and on and on.  When turning in my half dollars, all the non-keepers from all those boxes and rolls, I'd check inside the sorting machine for foreign coins.  Every time I was at a bank, or even merely walking past one, I'd ask the tellers for "weird money, anything old or foreign, please".  Most of the time, they'd say no, but sometimes I'd walk away with a handful of keepers.  My fingers subconsciously slipped into every reject tray and coin return they could reach, forever hoping for a silver coin rejected by the machine and left behind by its user.

I discovered that there were three regular coin shows in my area.  I went to one just out of curiosity.  I saw dealers with pick-it-yourself bins of loose foreign coins.  I went crazy!  I spent hours and hours picking through the bins until my back was sore, my fingers blackened, and my eyes straining, until I decided that coin show bourses were an uncomfortable place to sort bulk lots.  I'd rather be doing this at home, I thought, so I started offering to buy these bulk lots from the dealers by the pound.  I lugged a canvas sack home that day, and spent the next several weeks sorting it and cataloging my new specimens.  This has become my favorite way to grow my foreign coin collection.

Up until this point in my life, I had ignored the coins of my own country, the United States, in favor of coins from all other realms.  But having just built a clad Kennedy collection, I decided to do the same for all the other American coins.  In just two years, I was able to find every date and mintmark of US base metal coinage from the last half-century, just from circulation.  My Whitman folders are filled and filed.  My roll hunting yielded buffalo nickels, Mercury dimes, and yet more cool foreigns.

I also developed a bad habit.  Through coinflation.com and a linked forum that shall go unnamed, I found out that US cents from 1863-1982 were worth more for their copper content than as cents.  Where else could you get two cents of copper for one cent?  I read forum posts about "SHTF", prepping and survivalism.  I read some of the most discordant conspiracy ramblings and most potent political vitriol I've had the displeasure of reading.  I never bought their arguments, but it did start me mining copper cents out of circulation.  Copper cents are 20-25% of all cents in my area, and they haven't gotten any scarcer in seven years of looking, even during the Great Recession.  My copper hoard grew.  Sacks piled up in my basement.  

Then one day I realized that this copper-hoarding habit was giving me too much stress, too much negative emotions.  The whole thing was tied to the idea of fiat currency collapse, an event that was always billed as "just around the corner, any day now".  I could not live my life on constant red alert anymore, and I walked away.  (I still have the copper, and I still set aside copper cents from circulation, but I'm no longer searching through hundreds of dollars of cents at a time to find them.)

The copper-hoarding forum had a few foreign coin collectors like myself, and I conducted some satisfying trades with them.  I acquired some hoards and unwanted foreign coin collections, and even some incidental banknotes that needed a new home.  From 2007 to 2011, my collection doubled every year through forum purchases, coin show bulk lots, and bank teller set-asides.

Then one day a potential seller on The Forum told me that he had good feedback on Numista.  Numista impressed me from day one.  After years of searching for the perfect online numismatic source for world coins, I had finally found my Shangri-La!  The rest is history.  I have been so content with Numista that I have nearly severed my ties to any other online coin community that I'd been part of.  I don't need to go anywhere else.  To that user who first lured me here, whose name has drifted away from my memory, thank you, whoever you are.

So here I sit, on a hot summer day in August of 2013.  I have been a dedicated collector since 2005.  My collection has grown from a few hundred "whatever interesting coins crossed my path" to a cataloged and organized international collection of 8,500 specimens from 190 political entities.  I have a small library of coin books that I've liberated from thrift stores and garage sales.  I started swapping coins through the mail.  Luckily I have thousands of duplicate coins, saved from all the bulk lots I've purchased.  I have swapped coins with collectors Tennessee, Texas, Minnesota, California, Wisconsin, Florida, Ontario, and Quebec.  I have swapped coins with new friends in England, France, Germany, and Israel.  Swapping is more expensive than buying bulk lots, but it's also more precise.

Where will I go from here?  As my collection passes 10,000, as I fill the easier holes in my post-war base metal European collection, as I acquire the newly minted coins of this and following years, I will keep going.  The easy specimens will be added, and the harder areas will remain... the 19th century, commemoratives, colonial Africa and Asia, silver.  But I will always be here, hunting, swapping, and searching for the next great treasure.

(There... now I have completed my autobiography.  Thank you and good night.)

Started a few years back. My mom got me into it. Soon after, I got the oldest coin I had until Thanksgiving of 2012, when I got my first buffalo nickel. The former was a 1959 Lincoln Cent. I believe that I will be getting a 1919 wheat cent quite soon. My collection is a humble one so far. I don't have a silver coin yet. However, I have an 18K White Gold ring from Sri Lanka from pre-1929 given to me by my mother, and to her by her step-grandmother. It has a cool design on it. I don't own a coin book yet; library. I found Numista because my friend told me about it. Banknotes? None. I used to mostly get my coins from circulation.

Cerulean, you have a very long but worthwhile read. Every collector goes through their ups and downs.

One thought I've inherited from collecting is that it can be an appreciated hobby among what our generation calls "cool". It was when I was in my awkward stage that I got into collecting. I was 12 years old and was a fedora-wearing hermit and teacher's pet. It's the time in my life I roll my eyes on, thinking how low I went at the time. Nevertheless, I try to look forward, and being a relatively popular peer in high school, I've been looking up on life.

In my old townhome right across the street, I had a Lego-shaped "piggy-bank" which had all of my odd and foreign coins, which weren't really special, for the most part. Young and ambitious, I thought that anything could be interesting, so I kept pennies as early as the 60's. Collecting to me wasn't a hobby then, you could call it a forgetful hoarding; find a foreign or old coin, throw it in the jar and never look at it. But the timeline starts somewhere in grammar school, where one of my teachers showed me a box of old coins and passed up some silver: a 1962 peso, the '68 Olympics 25 pesos, and some Latin American coins my teacher mentioned "weren't worth much".

At this time I was teetering on the edge of little knowledge to no knowledge of coins. Numismatics was a foreign word to me, and I thought nickel and silver were the same metal. My mum, returning from Japan, had a fairly large bag filled with yen up to 500, so I kept them. At the same time, I knew very little Japanese, except ordinary dialects. Coins are the founding point of me learning Japanese in writing and speaking; yen carried the Heisei and Showa titles and their reignal years, and the characters slowly stuck to my head, I would later learn Japanese gradually, along with traditional Chinese. My grandfather also handed me down his mint sets from Japan. Thanks, Jiji.

My first numismatic website was Numismaticon, a small website based off of World Coins. It was simple but complex: look up your coin, add coin entry (along with many other useless details), and viola you have your collection saved. It was a time-consuming feat, and if you found a better grade coin, you would have to delete the entry and reenter. I was familiar with World Coin Gallery as my catalogue source, although it contained (and still does) many errors.

I became a web administrator on a small website I grew from the ground up. Coin Collecting Wiki was a Wikipedia-based website based from Wikia, and I strived to make the website perfect. CCW turned out to be a waste of my late middle-school career, since I spent hours on end entering pages no one would see. The site was like a nagging ex-girlfriend who always needed your attention and provided little gratification or self-respect.

From the small website I found Numista by accident. My work on CCW was similar in part to Numista, add images, compositions, engravers, the works, but the time spent there was five-fold. Googling for images, Numista provided clean-cropped images on a website with about 18,000 entries, the number I remember weeks before joining. The more I visited Numista, the more I enjoyed it, and in what seemed like seconds I became a member.

I ditched CCW. It was a social and academic burden, and Numista became my best friend and go-to site. Mirroring the work I provided in CCW, I added hundreds upon hundreds of entries onto Numista, most notably on Great Britain and Mexico. Because I was new there, I didn't understand the website's rules and regulations, so I stole hundreds of images from auction-based websites like CoinArchives and Muenzauktion. However, after a few months from joining, I became one of Numista's team members by request.

Joining the team was both a reward and consequence to Numista; while I added away thousands of entries, provided data to bare pages, and fixed wording on country and currency titles, the hundreds of pictures I added, not to mention the workload I dumped by not translating new pages to French, wouldn't do justice. It was my fault for allowing so many stolen images onto Numista, but we managed to take down most, if not all images. Stolen images were replaced with user images and websites that granted permission. I also lobbied for change to data on Numista, most notably including leaders-separated-by-dashes on pages, and capitalizing where needed; these were inevitably added to the guidelines.

Numista was growing larger by the month, as well as my work and praise on the site. I really began to love Numista, and I started to trade with members, even internationally. My first swaps were trading hoards of old nickels I found at the local bank, to trading silver I bought from a friend. My first two years of Numista waved goodbye like my freshman and sophomore years: forget the bad, remember the good, continue the good. In life this meant ridding my locks, be more kind and humble and not "nice guy", and, most importantly, improve social life. In turn, on Numista I slowly focused more on verifying pages instead of adding new entries, and helping members with Asian coins.

Personal life ascended, Numista life descended. These two lives I had went on an elevator of karma. While my life really prospered at school (I want to say it's because of the hair), and I became a "no BS kind-of-person", my grades improved, I started dating more frequently, and, most importantly, I became a more social person. However, on Numista, a number of scandals I was involved in caused some hatred among the French Numista members, and a small, rowdy bunch on the English side. Since my life in the real world was more appealing, I felt that I had to drift away from coins. Ironically, I madly bought silver and Chinese coins on eBay, and continued doing work on Numista, whether or not it would bring discontent to some members.

By the end of the year, I looked back at what my junior year taught me. Be genuine, be generous, be good. So I applied it to Numista, and I'm getting back on my feet. Since I'm standing, I worked hard on the site, verifying pages, doing the work that I should've done a long time ago.

Coin collecting wouldn't be the same without Numista, whether it is the work that is done or the members who I know. Truly I'd like to thank the members that were good to me on Numista, and give an apology to those I've wronged. While I'm walking into my senior year, I can only learn and move on from here, and continue to love the hobby I've grown up with.

I WILL be getting the 1919.
Edit: HIGHLY likely.

I started collecting at about 6 ish I guess I liked coins sort of and kept a very nice condition 50p of VE Day which I still have !
My granda was the man to really get me into it.. He had loads of coins from all over the world and from Olden times as his dad was in the merchant navy all through world war 2 and years after.. My first silver coin must have been about then too because I have a very nice condition 1964 Tokyo Olympics 100yen he gave me

@ZuluRaptorSpace,

For silver coins, try buying them for silver spot at those silver "recycling" stores.

Nice autobiographies guys. It's like reading an English assignment lol

Cerulean, great story.

 SmartOneKg it's awesome that you were inspired to learn Japanese because of some coins, I too have learned so much history and culture because of a few coins.

 I found my first wheat penny in a parking lot around 5, and my older brother was given some world coins which he lost, luckily I found one and kept it. I collected coins that I found in change or whatever, much like Cerulean, my collecting was dormant I had about 125 world coins and a few silver ones. Until around 2010 when I walked into a coin shop and this girl had a little sack of coins she was asking about. The guy was rude and low balled her. He offered her like $2. I followed her outside as she left and asked her and her boyfriend what they wanted, I didn't really know what they were, just paid $20 on a hunch that I might break even or do a little better. That's when I found Numista, that little sack was worth about $200. I entered the rest of my little collection and started looking harder for coins. I have not found a good deal like that again, and have paid too much several times. Swapping can cost as much as the coins are worth but its fun swapping with people all over the world.
  My Grandfather left me a few silver Guatemalan coins and a 3/4 full Mercury dime album, and my gold Krugerrand, I didn't even know he liked coins. I wish I could have known before he died, we could have coin talked. Anyway, thanks for the coins Grandfather.  

Quote: 15turtles@ZuluRaptorSpace,

For silver coins, try buying them for silver spot at those silver "recycling" stores.

Nice autobiographies guys. It's like reading an English assignment lol

 or put an add on craigslist for world coins, bulk buys. And beware of fake coins, especially at those silver "recycling" stores.
  Know your silver, try the ice test, https://en.numista.com/forum/topic4060.html

A LOT of fakes, better in America tho.

Beware in Europe.

I picked up a fake 1943 walking liberty half dollar a few days ago in a group of coins I got off this guy. I knew it was fake. But I decided to get it off the market, honestly it didn't cost anything. I made some money on the deal, It was crude and it wasn't even silver plated. For silver I would try a coin shop, that's where I found all my luck.

A few years ago (I thought it was in 2009) my father was walking into the basement, looking for some parts for his VW Beetle and he came across his old stamp collection. He thought to himself that stamps are decreasing in value getting faster and faster, so he wanted to auction his collection. A week later we went to an auction where he valued his collection, and in the meantime there was some sort of coinfair.
As I walked into the fair, a dealer in Roman coins spotted me and he gave me a Roman coin:

https://en.numista.com/catalogue/pieces27013.html

For a Roman coin, it looks pretty neat. It was only worth 3 euros, but still, I got a Roman coin!
Anyway, when we got home, I immediately started to look into the jar of coins I got from my parents. I sorted them by land, year and later by mintmark. Then I asked family members if they got any old coins and my 'collection' started to grow.
Eventually my collection became as big as it is now.

That Roman-coin dealer was quite clever to give me a Roman coin instead of something newer, because I think every 11-year old kid would think that's awesome and starts collecting!  

Enjoyable post, I never thought it would interest someone, but when I read through your stories, guys, I thought it might be worth to share...

So, I was born in 1966 with no interest to coins, whatsoever - probably like most of you in a country, called Hungary, being in the Soviet Block, as most of you would call, locked by police, no entry, no exit.

Majority of my mother's family (she was born in 1942) was deported from Czechoslovakia in 1946 after WW2 and forced to settle in Hungary. They had only one serious sin, shared with some half million others: They were Hungarians. Another 1.5 million Hungarians remained in Czechoslovakia.
In 1972 was the first time she could reunite with the rest of her (and my) family for a looong Easter holiday, in which, little "Imre" (aged 6) has received a lot of coins (according to Easter tradition) from every single lady in the village.

Little "Imre" was enthused and engaged by the double tailed lion of Czechoslovakia, and gave no excuse to find out why this animal has two tails... hence started to collect coins...

Soon after I have sorted out the lion-tail mystery, my mother has become the chief coordinator of the Hungarian Philharmonic Orchestra, and she has organized trips with a repertoire of famous Hungarian composers, like Liszt, Haydn, Bartok, Kodaly (if you don't know them, shame on you ) ... and she has sent 107 musicians around the world with a message: "Bring some coins for my son!" - now, given, the fact that she was (she is - God bless her!) a dominant woman, no serious violinist or trumpeter dared to return without some coins...

That is the way it got started, folks

Great stories, guys! thank you a lot! Here is mine.

As many people I had some foreign coins at home.
Some came to me when I was abroad, some came from colleagues from their business trips.
Coins were stored in a small film boxes (it was pre-digital cameras era) and I never thought about collecting coins.
They were nice souvenirs for me, nothing more.

Everything was changed at my new job. One day I brought my coins and spread them on the table.
Everybody stopped by the table, checking the coins. Then people started to bring their own coins from home.
Our sysadmin gave me a 10 Pfennig 1972 he just found in his just bought minivan, and so on.
Then a guy I worked with presented me a coin album at my birthday.
And organizing coins in the album I discovered Numista and an amazing world of coins and people collecting coins.
At this moment I got hooked on coins collecting. It was 2.5 months ago

Now I fill myself addicted to coins collecting, swapping, searching for coins in Numista, local flea markets, eBay and similar local web-auction sites.
I couldn't imagine the amount of coins out of circulation, in collectors' hands, boxes and albums.
I couldn't imagine how exciting could be the collecting of coins.

Very soon I faced the problem what I want to collect. First I decided to collect circulation modern coins of every country in the world.
It's cheap I thought, and interesting. I created a list of countries, but I felt like such topic lacks of something.
The coins from every country - it's boring, everybody does the same I thought.
But other topics (like coins with ships, or animals,.. etc.) didn't sound attractive to me.
And somehow I thought about holed coins - it's something unusual and very interesting.
So, from that moment I started hunting for the holed coins, but it's another story.

Quote: pikaSo, from that moment I started hunting for the holed coins, but it's another story.

 Do you want coins with a hole designed in them, or those that were drilled later ?



 I put those two in a bag last year in case anyone collected them.
On the left is India 1 Anna 1916 George V and on the right is UK 1 Penny 1901 Queen Victoria.

Quote: ZacUKDo you want coins with a hole designed in them, or those that were drilled later ?

Only coins with a hole by design :)

I started collecting when I was about seven. I even talked my father into taking me to a coin show. I had maybe 40 coins. One day my little brother broke into my collection and used all my coins to by candy. I stopped collecting that day. Fast-forward 20 years, my father-in-law collects coins. He loves to talk about them but none of his kids will listen anymore. I usually get trapped with him and his collection. He only collects US coins (I'm American) and they don't have much interest for me. One day he pulls out a sack of international coins he came across... I was mesmerized for hours. I felt like a seven year old again. I love finding out what makes what ever or whomever is on a coin important in that country. I love the beauty I come across in the designs. I love picking up a 100 coin from halfway around the world that could barely be considered VG and imagining all the pockets this coin has been through, all the things it has been used to buy, all the happiness/substantiance/pain those things have created. I am a seven year old imaging that coin's story.

I remember I was just bored one day and went through my change jar, and thought it was cool that I found (didn't actually, but that doesn't) some quarters from 1776 (they were actually bicentennial quarters), but it still gave a love for coins.

I started collecting coins around twelve yrs ago when I was about eight. My Dad was in the US Navy (and at this time, we were stationed in Japan) and he had traveled to several different countries and never traded the currency in. So, Mom was going through their safe one day and I saw all these different coins and banknotes from Singapore, Korea, Thailand, Australia, Spain and several other countries. I would store them in tackle box bins with labels on the container until I came back to the US and realized the proper way to store them. I remember going to coin shows and being the youngest person there, and all the collectors encouraging me and glad to see young people still enjoying collecting coins. Flash forward 10 yrs and I ran across the amazing site and started trading with some awesome swappers.

It's become a passion and honestly a great way to relax.

My first silver coin purchase was in 2019,

three 1/10 Netherlands east indies Gulden.

States quarters was my first coin collection.

I remember the charmant waitress in the role of the innkeeper, struggling to not sleep after an exhausting evening, when all clients have left after having finished their huge plates of full rack ribs. The music had vanished, faded away, only the the icy howling wind surfing on the lakes was roaring loudly, permently, filling the tavern with a persistent rumor. She staggered behind the counter, straight in the eyes, sorting quarters with me after 2 in the morning, when the night is already so advanced that it was not worth going to bed, to find my missing quarters, somewhere in north Michigan, a while ago ...
the states quaters will always have a special place in my heart ...

Quote: "15turtles"​Started collecting when I was appx 4, got interested by the Canadian circ commems...
​first coin book - Charlston Standard 2006 for Canadian coins
​first silver coin... a rlly crappy walking Liberty half...
​found Numista because it's more friendly than coincommunity
​First *collectable* banknote - when I was 5 it was a 70's 1 dollar bill. I have no idea where it is now.......... x.

​Old post but I am a fan of coincommunity, just there aren't as many world coin collector there.

All your stories are fascinating! Will be sharing mine too.

I started collecting coins as an elementary student. I got fascinated with the different coins in circulation (here in the Philippines) considering their different appearances, colors, and sizes. I eventually decided to try and collect each type of circulating coin we had, and I really found it fascinating to look at them side by side. My parents supported my hobby and they eventually exposed me to the older coins no longer in circulation - the ones they themselves used years ago. This is where I got my hands on older coins that were square, scalloped, and polygonal in shape. Now, appearance is one thing, but I was also able to explore coin collecting websites that explored on the history and background of the pieces themselves. This is where I learned about precious coins, proof coins, commemoratives, leper colony coins, and even those that were quite controversial due to factors like material cost, user experience, and the person featured on it. My fascination only grew when my parents and I kept finding old coins, even antique and precious ones, at home (my house is a fairly old structure). My great grandfather and dad had their own silver hoards and my dad took my interest as an opportunity to pass them down to me.

For a certain period I only collected local coins. I entertained the thought of being able to complete a coin set which I most likely wouldn't be able to do for coins of other countries considering their availability here. However, the variety of foreign coins is really interesting and I was able to get in touch with a coin dealer near where I live. I took the opportunity to get complete coin sets when I went to two other foreign countries (for school purposes) but in the end, to complete a set for countries I haven't visited yet did not really cross my mind anymore. My uncle from another country, who is a numismatist and a philatelist, sent me regular circulating and commemorative coins as well, so my collection only grew from there.

For banknotes, I did not really think of collecting them at first, considering how difficult they are to maintain compared to coins, and how the banknote with the lowest face value is higher than the coin with the highest face value. To complete a banknote set for me meant avoiding to spend banknotes with high face values (like the PHP 500 and 1000 here). Later on, though, the same level of fascination I had for coins also caught up with my interest in banknotes. I also thought, if I were to collect numismatic items, I might as well collect banknotes too since they go hand-in-hand with coins.

I discovered Numista while verifying a token my friend showed me. Neither him nor I knew what it was, so I had to input the inscriptions on the internet. Its Numista profile appeared in the search results and I got curious, and so I did some exploring here and there and learned how you can swap with other members, catalogue your collection, study details about different coins in their respective profiles, etc. (I discovered the forum much later, though.) Eventually I made my own account, and a couple of years after that, Numista introduced its banknote sections and I was able to input my other collection as well. Anyway, this is where I am at now.

Quite a long read, oops! Cheers to more years with collectible coins and banknotes!

Great stories.
I am interested in the story of the charmant waitress in the role of the innkeeper - did she manage to get a special place in your heart??

Quote: "Cerulean"​When I was about ten years old (circa 1990), my father gave me a small handful of unusual coins he'd found in his pocket change over the years. (Dad has also been a lifelong nickel collector since his childhood.) The coins he gave me contained wheat cents, Canadian coins, some German pfennig, and a few Caribbean coins from the Bahamas, Bermuda, and the Cayman Islands. Included among them were my first silver coins, a 1963 Canada dime and a 1951 Canada quarter. I set these coins aside, and added to it any old American coins I came across or Canadian coin that sneak south of the border.
​
​In 1992 I added a silver round to my collection, a coin which I have been unable to locate in Numista's catalog. It's design is a modified Peace dollar, without a date or face value and the text 99.99% FINE SILVER ONE TROY OUNCE added to the reverse. I won this coin at school during a Valentine's Day contest.
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​I traveled to the UK and Ireland for three weeks in the summer of 1995. This was with a US government program called People To People. The experience was somewhere between being a tourist and being an exchange student. I brought back a handful of UK and Irish decimal coins, but only the Irish 50p remains with me to this day.
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​In 1998, I got my first permanent job at an Arby's restaurant a few miles from home. I'd worked previous summers, but the Arby's gig was the first job I'd held that wasn't strictly seasonal. I'd keep random pocket change with me so I could swap out for any cool coins I found in the register drawers. The coolest coin I found this way was a 1995 Vatican 200 lire. Eight thousand coins later, this is still the only Vatican coin I own.
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​I left for college in 2000, to attend a small engineering school just outside New York City. My daily usage of cash dwindled to nothing, and I didn't have a chance to find coins in my pocket change, nor did I have the time or cash to build my collection. Indeed, my "collecting" habits at this time were largely dormant. I do recall one particular foreign coin I found during my college years. I was visiting Times Square in Manhattan in the autumn of 2000. While waiting to cross the street, I looked down, spied a dime, pocketed it, and continued on my way. Only later, when my group ducked into a record store, did I have time to inspect my find... a 1999 jiao from China.
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​In 2002 I discovered a new avenue for finding coins... geocaching! My dad introduced me to this cute little GPS hobby. Foreign coins are commonly used as trade trinkets in caches, and I quickly amassed specimens from Western Europe and the British Commonwealth.
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​In time I graduated and moved to Washington DC. I found an Iraqi coin in my apartment's parking lot on the very week I moved here. I got a job downtown, and took the Metro trains to work each day. I stumbled across a 1944 wheat cent on the train, and went online to look up its mintage. At that moment, the dormant collector within me finally awakened!
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​I signed up on WCG and started entering my small collection. I discovered a number of coin collector blogs and read them diligently. I started an Excel Spreadsheet to document my collection. I joined a metal detectorist forum and read about the strategies of coin roll hunting. The roll hunters were having their best luck with half dollars, so I started to order boxes of halves from my bank. Half dollars have not really circulated in everyday American commerce for over 15 years, and hidden in the mountains of unwanted dollars that build up in bank vaults are the silver halves from before 1971. I continued to roll hunt through half dollars for a few years, finding a few dozen silver Franklins and Kennedys and putting together a full set of clad JFKs (sans 1987 and post-2001, of course). My half dollar collection was the crown jewel of my hobby at that point. Around 2010, I decided that the rewards weren't worth the time and effort, and left half hunting behind.
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​The DC area is a very international place, fertile and fruitful grounds for foreign coins. I encountered foreign coins in banks, supermarkets, food courts, and parking lots. UK, Eurozone, Chile, Australia, Bolivia, Vietnam, Ethiopia, Trinidad and Tobago, and on and on. When turning in my half dollars, all the non-keepers from all those boxes and rolls, I'd check inside the sorting machine for foreign coins. Every time I was at a bank, or even merely walking past one, I'd ask the tellers for "weird money, anything old or foreign, please". Most of the time, they'd say no, but sometimes I'd walk away with a handful of keepers. My fingers subconsciously slipped into every reject tray and coin return they could reach, forever hoping for a silver coin rejected by the machine and left behind by its user.
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​I discovered that there were three regular coin shows in my area. I went to one just out of curiosity. I saw dealers with pick-it-yourself bins of loose foreign coins. I went crazy! I spent hours and hours picking through the bins until my back was sore, my fingers blackened, and my eyes straining, until I decided that coin show bourses were an uncomfortable place to sort bulk lots. I'd rather be doing this at home, I thought, so I started offering to buy these bulk lots from the dealers by the pound. I lugged a canvas sack home that day, and spent the next several weeks sorting it and cataloging my new specimens. This has become my favorite way to grow my foreign coin collection.
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​Up until this point in my life, I had ignored the coins of my own country, the United States, in favor of coins from all other realms. But having just built a clad Kennedy collection, I decided to do the same for all the other American coins. In just two years, I was able to find every date and mintmark of US base metal coinage from the last half-century, just from circulation. My Whitman folders are filled and filed. My roll hunting yielded buffalo nickels, Mercury dimes, and yet more cool foreigns.
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​I also developed a bad habit. Through coinflation.com and a linked forum that shall go unnamed, I found out that US cents from 1863-1982 were worth more for their copper content than as cents. Where else could you get two cents of copper for one cent? I read forum posts about "SHTF", prepping and survivalism. I read some of the most discordant conspiracy ramblings and most potent political vitriol I've had the displeasure of reading. I never bought their arguments, but it did start me mining copper cents out of circulation. Copper cents are 20-25% of all cents in my area, and they haven't gotten any scarcer in seven years of looking, even during the Great Recession. My copper hoard grew. Sacks piled up in my basement.
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​Then one day I realized that this copper-hoarding habit was giving me too much stress, too much negative emotions. The whole thing was tied to the idea of fiat currency collapse, an event that was always billed as "just around the corner, any day now". I could not live my life on constant red alert anymore, and I walked away. (I still have the copper, and I still set aside copper cents from circulation, but I'm no longer searching through hundreds of dollars of cents at a time to find them.)
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​The copper-hoarding forum had a few foreign coin collectors like myself, and I conducted some satisfying trades with them. I acquired some hoards and unwanted foreign coin collections, and even some incidental banknotes that needed a new home. From 2007 to 2011, my collection doubled every year through forum purchases, coin show bulk lots, and bank teller set-asides.
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​Then one day a potential seller on The Forum told me that he had good feedback on Numista. Numista impressed me from day one. After years of searching for the perfect online numismatic source for world coins, I had finally found my Shangri-La! The rest is history. I have been so content with Numista that I have nearly severed my ties to any other online coin community that I'd been part of. I don't need to go anywhere else. To that user who first lured me here, whose name has drifted away from my memory, thank you, whoever you are.
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​So here I sit, on a hot summer day in August of 2013. I have been a dedicated collector since 2005. My collection has grown from a few hundred "whatever interesting coins crossed my path" to a cataloged and organized international collection of 8,500 specimens from 190 political entities. I have a small library of coin books that I've liberated from thrift stores and garage sales. I started swapping coins through the mail. Luckily I have thousands of duplicate coins, saved from all the bulk lots I've purchased. I have swapped coins with collectors Tennessee, Texas, Minnesota, California, Wisconsin, Florida, Ontario, and Quebec. I have swapped coins with new friends in England, France, Germany, and Israel. Swapping is more expensive than buying bulk lots, but it's also more precise.
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​Where will I go from here? As my collection passes 10,000, as I fill the easier holes in my post-war base metal European collection, as I acquire the newly minted coins of this and following years, I will keep going. The easy specimens will be added, and the harder areas will remain... the 19th century, commemoratives, colonial Africa and Asia, silver. But I will always be here, hunting, swapping, and searching for the next great treasure.
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​(There... now I have completed my autobiography. Thank you and good night.)

​Update?

My collection started when my god-father gave me a few kilos of world-coins, he had taken out of his pockets, when coming home from his many travels all over the world. That was in 1956. Since then I have been "bitten" by this hobby. I started to put Danish coins aside by their year, and asked my family and friends to donate their foreign or not usable coins to my collection. That went on like that for many years. I bought my first coins catalog to cover my Scandinavian coins.

In 1974 I moved to Germany to work for Siemens in their informatics department for all their subsidaries in the world, and I did a lot of travelling, as did my colleagues, so my collection still grew from my own and my friends travels, and my doubles even more. I now found a need to buy a German coins catalog (Germany / Austria / Switzerland).

In 1976 I moved to Mexico to work for Siemens over there, and in stead of buying a Mexican catalog, I found for the first time in my life the Krause and Mischler catalogs, and bought the 1901 to date, in those days. That kind of changed my whole approach to my hobby, since I learned about grading, variants and what have you? I bought the KM catalogs nearly every year to keep up to date. In 1986 I moved back to Munich and went on travelling a lot.

France became my new homeland in 2000. In 2002 I found out, that the Internet could be used to contact and exchange coins with other likewise interested persons. Because of that I started my first excel doubles list with KM# , gradings and so on. When I had finished to register all my doubles I had more than 10.000 coins in the list. I was then ready to trade via the web.

In 2004 I became a contributor to the Krause catalogs. I had noticed that a lot of the coins in the catalogs were missing either scans, weights or diameters, or were simply not known to Krause, so since then I've been measuring, describing etc all the coins going through my hands to Krause. This gives me a high satisfaction, since it helps all the collectors in the world, and I plan to go on "working" like that for our community of world coin collectors.

I went to Aix-en-Provence for a project in 2005 and stayed down there for 2 years. To occupy my time in my little hotel-suite, I started to buy a lot of bulk coins on internet and set up a second swaplist, to be able to do trades again. So now I have TWO swap-lists and one day I'll have to integrate the two, which will then have more than 20.000 coins in it. The integration is now finished and I managed to sell of some 100 kilos of coins in the process, which left me with some room for my collection.

Since 2008 I have started to document the variants I find, where to find mint marks etc. The documentations can be found here: https://sites.google.com/site/coinvarietiescollection/home. We are a group of people documenting all our findings, so you will also see documentations from other people on that site! I also have added my findings to the appropriate coins in numista mostly on the English site.

Some time in 2012 I joined Numista. After 12 months I had managed to enter my collection in Numista. I then started to enter my doubles, but gave that up, since to keep more than 20,000 doubles both in my excel list and in numista wasn't passible. So I'm only having my doubles in this very excel list. Since I do a lot of swaps outside of numista it's practical like that and many numista traders don't mind to go through my excel list.

My collection in numbers (all coins are different, I collect by type, year, mint & variants)
Coins in my collection: 41.406
Doubles in excel: 17.396
Swaps all in all: 558
Swaps in numista: 92
Swaps out of numista: 466

Quote: "ABonymous"​All your stories are fascinating! Will be sharing mine too.
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​I started collecting coins as an elementary student. I got fascinated with the different coins in circulation (here in the Philippines) considering their different appearances, colors, and sizes. I eventually decided to try and collect each type of circulating coin we had, and I really found it fascinating to look at them side by side. My parents supported my hobby and they eventually exposed me to the older coins no longer in circulation - the ones they themselves used years ago. This is where I got my hands on older coins that were square, scalloped, and polygonal in shape. Now, appearance is one thing, but I was also able to explore coin collecting websites that explored on the history and background of the pieces themselves. This is where I learned about precious coins, proof coins, commemoratives, leper colony coins, and even those that were quite controversial due to factors like material cost, user experience, and the person featured on it. My fascination only grew when my parents and I kept finding old coins, even antique and precious ones, at home (my house is a fairly old structure). My great grandfather and dad had their own silver hoards and my dad took my interest as an opportunity to pass them down to me.
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​For a certain period I only collected local coins. I entertained the thought of being able to complete a coin set which I most likely wouldn't be able to do for coins of other countries considering their availability here. However, the variety of foreign coins is really interesting and I was able to get in touch with a coin dealer near where I live. I took the opportunity to get complete coin sets when I went to two other foreign countries (for school purposes) but in the end, to complete a set for countries I haven't visited yet did not really cross my mind anymore. My uncle from another country, who is a numismatist and a philatelist, sent me regular circulating and commemorative coins as well, so my collection only grew from there.
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​For banknotes, I did not really think of collecting them at first, considering how difficult they are to maintain compared to coins, and how the banknote with the lowest face value is higher than the coin with the highest face value. To complete a banknote set for me meant avoiding to spend banknotes with high face values (like the PHP 500 and 1000 here). Later on, though, the same level of fascination I had for coins also caught up with my interest in banknotes. I also thought, if I were to collect numismatic items, I might as well collect banknotes too since they go hand-in-hand with coins.
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​I discovered Numista while verifying a token my friend showed me. Neither him nor I knew what it was, so I had to input the inscriptions on the internet. Its Numista profile appeared in the search results and I got curious, and so I did some exploring here and there and learned how you can swap with other members, catalogue your collection, study details about different coins in their respective profiles, etc. (I discovered the forum much later, though.) Eventually I made my own account, and a couple of years after that, Numista introduced its banknote sections and I was able to input my other collection as well. Anyway, this is where I am at now.
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​Quite a long read, oops! Cheers to more years with collectible coins and banknotes!

​great you had access to an old house that had coins tucked away... i kind of envy that lol... on a side note i love the 1949 english Series PH notes esp... the $2, that was a perfect note

I started somewhere between September and October 2016. Back then I had a small bag of coins from places I’d visited in the past (Japan, Singapore, the US, amongst others), and had plans to collect one coin from every country in the world. Naturally most of the “country reps” in my collection were the oldest I was able to find in the house. I also noticed that there were quite a lot of Queen Elizabeth coins in the house, and through them I became more and more fascinated with Hong Kong’s colonial past.

Then at some point not long after the start of school I basically said “screw world coins, I’ll stick to a local collection”. I had no idea why I wanted to axe all issuers from my collection besides the Hong Kong QEII coins and I STILL have no idea to this day. By the end of November of that year I had accumulated around 72 coins in a small metal box.

Also in November, my father bestowed upon me three Chartered Bank $10 notes from the early 80s, seemingly out of nowhere, and encouraged me to venture into Hong Kong banknotes. I was hesitant at first but eventually said yes. This would prove to be a wise decision and now my banknotes are getting way more care and attention than my coins.

I’d say I got a pretty big head start. By May 2017 I had already expanded my collection to around 750 colonial coins (sourced from a tally conducted around that time) and around a hundred banknotes (though most of them were duplicates), plus some King George VI pieces from my grandmother and other people I knew around my residency.

Starting in 2018 I got in touch with a hobby shop about a half hour’s bus ride from where I live. That was perhaps my first time buying coins instead of having them given or exchanged to me. I would find myself buying my way out of vacancies and wish lists more and more over the next few years.

From there I began to gradually build my coin collection until late September 2020 when I truly committed myself to expanding my banknote collection, from which my collection’s growth became explosive.

I took all my duplicate notes and traded part of them for new notes that I did not yet have, as well as getting in touch with an old friend who was willing to exchange them for their face value in today’s Hong Kong dollars (meaning that I can acquire something like a 1968 500-dollar note for only $500 versus upwards of a thousand if I had bought from a hobby shop). Although my banknote collection was arguably smaller than it was before, I focused on variety instead of quantity. Different dates, types and color variations were being added left and right. I lost a lot of personal savings in the process, but you know what they say about numismatics... it’s the only hobby where you can spend all your money and still have some left.

And that brings me to today with well over 3,500 coins and 250 notes, stored away in a stack of drawers and a two-ring binder. And before anyone asks, I still haven’t reversed my decision regarding taking my collections international... yet.

All values, if any, are in Hong Kong dollars.