Collecting gold coins

The practice of collecting gold coins has two distinct purposes.

1. Purely as a hobby
2. As an investment

Either way, you need to know a lot about coin collecting and precious metals before you get into it.

If you are doing it as a hobby, you may initially be interested because you came across a peculiar coin or one that commemorated a special event. If you get this coin free, then it is not a bad place to start. However, if you need to buy it you should find out more about its history, value and above all its legality. Sometimes coins are recovered illegally from dig sites or from the ocean and then sold. In this instance the coins are highly illegal and should never be bought because you may not receive compensation when you are forced to return it. If it is legal, you need to ensure that you are not being fleeced.

If you want to get into gold or silver coin collecting as an investment opportunity, you need to be aware of how the precious metals market functions. Particularly, you need to know how much each metal is worth and what the daily fluctuations are. In recent times gold has stayed fairly stable, so you won’t get big returns when you sell it. Nevertheless, its stability is a great asset; for example $1000 in gold is far more valuable than $1000 in cash, as currency can fluctuate wildly.Selling that gold when the currency dips, will give you far more than $1000 and thereby leave you with a lot more money in hand than you would have had if you put it in the bank.