silver coins and what you can expect for them

bottlecaps

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I originally wrote this as a response to bbader61gv question "Where can I sell my silver coins and what can I expect for them" http://metaldetectingforum.com/showthread.php?p=355475#post355475 but decided to make it is own thread in order to inform a greater audience.


While the same negotiating principles can be applied for a coin with numismatic value the following is based on selling "beat-up" dug silver coins that don't have any real numismatic value.

Most local coin shops and pawn shops will pay melt value for your silver coins.

So say you have a beat up Morgan dollar it weighs 1 once its 90% silver

@ a market price of $12.00 per ounce of 999. Silver

$ 10.88 would be the market value of the silver in your morgan.

And it goes the same with dimes 10 beat up dimes, 4 beat up quarters 2 beat up halfs = $10.80 market value.

Now if "$10.80" is market value of 1 once of 90% silver a coin shop still has to have it melt down and refined and then sell it/ship it to a jeweler middleman ect... this all cost money so you may only get $8.00 more or less after everything is said and done.

Now that we covered that in order to get the best price from a coin dealer you could spend all day driving around burning all your profit trying to find the best price but if you ask your coin dealer for a store credit price he may give you more money. i.e. You trade in 10 ounces of coined silver (100 beat-up mercs) he offers you $80.00 cash or $95.00 store credit, You look around the store and settle on a 1850 gold dollar priced at book value of 145.00 in vf-20 condition. Now You have turned from the seller to the purchaser now you have the negotiation power!

You offer him a non insulting $120.00 he agrees to the price and you hand him $25.00 and walk out of the store with your shiny gold dollar.

Now for accepting the store credit you added $15 to your sale then you negotiated $25.00 off your purchase giving you a total of $40.00 add that to the $80.00 cash that he originally offered for your silver and you got $120.00 thats $9.80 more than market value! But wait there is more you could hold on to that gold coin or you could sell it on eBay giving you the potential to make an even larger profit!
 
in both of these threads there is still no mention of selling to a refinery for melt value or to make into bullion... I would like to turn my horribly beat up silver coins into one ounce bars.... do the refineries accept coins???
 
in both of these threads there is still no mention of selling to a refinery for melt value or to make into bullion... I would like to turn my horribly beat up silver coins into one ounce bars.... do the refineries accept coins???

all of the local coin shops around here sell .999 silver bars in many diffrent wieghts bought from middlemen who buy it from the refinery. i could go to the coin shop today trade my silver coins in and buy a bar as for sending your coins into a refinery and then them mailing you a silver bar made with your coins would never happen when they refine metals its with hundreds or even thousands of pounds at a time. the refinery is a whole saller and does not deal in retail.

also when you pack you silver in that envalope and you get a check notice its called a "settlement" because you have to settle for what they give you! be very aware that many refineries have thousands of complaints for under value , lost items or simply never sending a check. I would much rather deal with some one in person handing me cash$$$ when I hand him my hard earned silver!!!!!


so o answer your question yes refineries buy coins and you can find thousands of them by a simple google search but why take the risk your local coin shop buys them too
 
Midwest Refineries is a well known and easy to deal with company from what I hear... JCham sends jewelry in to melted to bars and shipped back all the time. Granted it may not be your items coming back in that bar, but your bars are based on the weight you send to them. Paying a coin dealer for an assayers bar is insanity... they overcharge on every item in their shops by at least %50 of its book or melt value, that's rediculous!! I'm not gonna pay a coin dealer $35 or so for a 1 ounce bullion bar worth $14 in melt value. I have never and will never buy coins or bullion from a dealer.... prices are truly outrageous! I went to one in the spring and asked if he bought old silver coins for melt... he offered me 6x face on the coins when the melt value was 12x face and when I asked what he charged for beat up silver dollars (to make coin rings) he wanted to charge me $21 a piece for them almost completely worn smooth.... The heck with that!!

Actually now that I think about it... let me know next time you are going to the coin shop, I'll pay ya 1x more then your dealer will for your scrap coins... because even then its still a steal....
 
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in both of these threads there is still no mention of selling to a refinery for melt value or to make into bullion... I would like to turn my horribly beat up silver coins into one ounce bars.... do the refineries accept coins???

Im not very knowlegable in these things but I am thinking it would be easier to sell the coins ( or rings ) if you dont melt them down first , that way they know what they are and the purity of the silver. If you melt it down first then they cant really idetify it. Makes sense to me anyway.
 
no no no... I was saying send your coins to the refinery, they melt them into bars, charge you a service charge and send the bars to you. They offer that service for jewelry and other silver/gold items... I'm just unsure if they accept coinage.
 
no no no... I was saying send your coins to the refinery, they melt them into bars, charge you a service charge and send the bars to you. They offer that service for jewelry and other silver/gold items... I'm just unsure if they accept coinage.

THEY TAKE COINAGE refineries are like bottom feeders they would burn the monolisa if it had silver in it.

IF YOU WOuLD JUST LISTEN TO ME YOU WOULD BE IN YOUR CAR DRIVING TO THE COIN SHOP WITH YOUR SCRAP SILVER COINS GETTING CASH AND BUYING AS MANY SILVER BARS THEY HAVE

I GUESS IF YOU WANTED BARS MADE FROM YOU R ACTUAL FINDS YOU COULD GO TO harborfreight AND BUY A TORCH AND MELT THEM DOWN YOUR SELF AND THEY WOULD BE .900 FINE
 
Bottlecaps, please tone down the shouting.

Dunno what google you use but "refinery complaints" gives 80 hits and without the "'s about 290.000, of which most deal with pollution issues.

Afaik several members have used the Midwest Refineries with good success and if you check their webpage they claim they pay you either in 1: Check, 2: Bank Wire, 3: Gold, Silver and Platinum bars, coins and rounds. Or any combination of those 3.

As I haven't found any valuable metals in such quantites that I'd need such services I'm really an outsider in this issue..not mentioning being a non-US person. Perhaps you have personal experience with refineries.

Voriax
 
Heres another question along this line. If you were to melt stuff down into bars or even have a company do it for you , and even if they were stamped with the purity , how would a future buyer of the bars be sure they are the purity they say they are ? These days it seems nobody trusts anybody so without being able to identify exactly what the silver was before melt , and they arent gonna just take your word for it I dont think , wouldnt they have to melt it down and test it to make sure it is what it is ? Not that its really important in this discussion, I am just curious about it now.
 
like jewlery, bars also have a makers mark while I geuss this could also be forged another way would be to do the math take the wieght and volume and make sure its correct ie The density of gold is 10.18 troy ounces in one cubic inch of pure gold
 
Be careful when considering what is numismatic value. I was at a pawn shop looking at Morgans a month or two ago. They won't sell key dates or MS coins over-the-counter (apparently they sell these online). Nonetheless, I found an 1888-O Morgan in maybe VF+ shape for $16. I looked carefully at it, more carefully than the pawn shop owner apparently, and noted that it was the so-called "Hot Lips" double-die error coin. Worth about double what I paid.

Also, I have the current Yeoman's "Red Book" and also a copy from about a decade ago. What I sometimes do is look at a coin's price in 1999, and again in 2009. Some coins seem to jump at different rates in terms of numismatic value, I try to imagine a sort of 'trajectory' for where a coin might land in another decade.

So I'd be careful melting down silver, unless you're very clear the coin is "junk silver".
 
Heres another question along this line. If you were to melt stuff down into bars or even have a company do it for you , and even if they were stamped with the purity , how would a future buyer of the bars be sure they are the purity they say they are ? These days it seems nobody trusts anybody so without being able to identify exactly what the silver was before melt , and they arent gonna just take your word for it I dont think , wouldnt they have to melt it down and test it to make sure it is what it is ? Not that its really important in this discussion, I am just curious about it now.

Most people who buy rounds or bars of metal look for well known companies like Johnson Matthey for example. There are plenty of others out there. A few years back I bought 2 100 oz bars, well actually one was a 102.? oz bar from another company. Both were marked .999 fine. The dealer charged me 45 cents over spot per ounce for the JM bar, the other he sold to me for 25 cents over spot and only for 100 oz even though it was 102 oz because of the reason out forth above. So yes the refiner name plays a big part. For a reference one ounce rounds at the time were $1-1.25 over spot. I would like to point out holding silver in modern US coins is probably the cheapest way to hold silver. You and the rest of the world knows exactly the silver content too. If you are holding silver as a personal hedge to feed your family in case of all out financial collapse that IS what you need. Are you going to saw pieces off a large bar to barter?:lol: Besides those 10,000 dime bags Monex sells make a gun safe harder to steal! :cool:
 
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