There are literally hundreds of errors in the Roosevelt Dimes that are still in circulation, and if you want to search earlier, you’ll find LOTS to develop.
What is “Development”?
Development is simply the process by which you bring a coin from “raw” state to “market” state, and can involve a number of intricate steps:
- FIND THE COIN — Easier said than done, I’m afraid. Experience is the best teacher. Fool’s gold looks to the inexperienced prospector exactly like gold, but to the seasoned miner, it’s clearly not gold, doesn’t behave like gold, look or feel like gold, just plain isn’t gold.
- HANDLE THE COIN — Once you have the coin in hand, it’s time to immediately protect it from further damage. Decide to protect it, and do so.
- PREP THE FLIP — Take the protective cover off the inside of the flip and place it non-sticky side at the bottom, sticky side over.
- BAG THE COIN — Carefully, handling it with dry fingers at the rim only, turn the coin face-down and place it into the flip.
- CLOSE THE FLIP — It’s not enough to just lightly touch the flip to seal it. You should gently massage the flip closed until you know it’s sealed well. Take the extra second and you won’t regret it years from now, when you pull the coin out of a storage box.
- IDENTIFY THE COIN — Immediately write out the flip inscriptions, completely, right now while you still remember what you saw in the raw coin, because the flip will hide some details, and memory fails after an unpredictable amount of time. This is where experience pays off bigtime, when you KNOW your market.
- PRICE THE COIN — Price tag goes on right away with the current market value. If you don’t know the current market value, you’ll have to research it a bit online, perhaps on eBay, but also check with coin merchants and coin exchanges where coin collectors buy, sell and trade.
Before attempting to tackle Development, you need to know what you’re searching and what you’re searching for, and mostly you need to know exactly WHY you’re searching Roosevelt Dimes in the first place, and that’s easy to explain, but quite difficult to actually accomplish and get to the marketplace, so what ARE you looking for?
You’re looking for Jewelry Findings for your “Significant Date” jewelry.
You’re not looking at dimes as numismatics, but at the same time, you’re not ignoring the fact that they have numismatic value, especially the mint errors and other variations.
As absurd as it may sound, you’re approaching Roosevelt Dimes as a jewelry part, something that goes into a piece of jewelry or object of personal adornment, and you might also be searching for dimes that would work well in art-craft projects, such as decoupage or other paper art, or sculptural accents.
You might also want dimes for your fashion gear, and they can indeed be worked in with some ingenuity and style — you can’t imagine how good they can look, sewn into a hat or performance vest, cape or jacket, but the real real reason you’re searching through thousands of dimes is …
You need the change for a parking meter.
Problem is, parking meters will soon only take cards, so if you’re a coin-dependent laggard in the 21st century, get with it, bud. Coins are a thing of the past, or soon will be, so do your coin digging now, pardner, or lose the chance.
Had you put yourself to work back in the year 1909, you could have amassed a fortune for your heirs & assigns in the 21st century by investing in what was then an ordinary $25 bank-box of 50 rolls of mint-state 1909-s VDB pennies, which would be valued today in the millions of dollars.
You could have set aside a roll of 1916-d dimes in mint-state as well, and your heirs would be several million dollars richer from that, as well.
If you’d only put a box of mint-state silver quarters or halves or dollars aside back in 1974 when the U.S. went off the “silver standard” in order to enrich the upper class Americans even more, you could put your entire family through college several times over and still have enough left over to fill the gas tank and buy a bag of groceries, if you didn’t include meat and health food products.
Meat and Health Foods, what a concept. Maybe a Vegan Raw Meat Diet would sell well in a paperback???
Problem is, I can’t actualize EVERY idea that comes through. Maybe you have a rich uncle who’d like to leave you some money, so you can open a “Chaw Raw Beef” club somewhere in a neighborhood full of expensive cars and 10,000 square foot mansions.
“In My Father’s House Are Many Mansions” simply refers to the fact that every room had a different designer.
So how do you wring $20 out of an ordinary clad junk-metal post-1964 non-silver Roosevelt Dime?
The answer is simple in the end, but complex in its various parts, and I’ll be only too happy to explain how to develop this multi-million dollar potential business for yourself and your family, and what’s more, I’ll do it for free.
I don’t want your money, I want you to learn how to SEE.
If you can see a coin, you can see the Kingdom.
I know that’s BOUND to be misinterpreted by mischievous demons into “money” stuff, as in “focus on the money”, but it’s actually about ANY object in the universe.
It requires your INTEREST before you can see it, a real interest in seeing the object, not just glancing at it or scanning over it or “noticing” it, but actually, deeply and fully SEEING it, and although it may seem obvious and easy to you, it isn’t.
I GUARANTEE that about a year from when you start doing the Coinology Soul Search of pennies, you will at some point sit bolt-upright and exclaim, “My God, I think I’ve just SEEN the penny for the first time!”
It’s differenter than you think.
What do you want, good grammar, or accurate information?
So in order to glean good solid cash from a coin, you first need a coin, which you will have to either buy from someone who found it or who traded with someone who found it, or you found it your own self on your velvet search pad.
If you found the dime yourself, you got it for a dime. A box of dime rolls costs $250, but you can buy 10 rolls at a time if that’s how you have to manage it, or maybe the bank officials will let you stand around at the counter with a loupe, a magnifying snoop mounted on your bean, and a velvet pad with coins spread all over it.
If your bank people are insufficiently enlightened to allow you to perform a simple two-hour coin search on their check-writing counter, you might consider banking elsewhere, or perhaps performing the operation in the privacy of your own home.
Actually, push comes to shove, I prefer the home solution myself, because I prefer to do the coin search in my skivvies.
That’s not actually true — I don’t want to pull your leg that far to the left. I do my coin searches at my jewelry bench, because the bench is right up at chest level, making it easy to scan the coins with my Opti-Vision snoot, which goes over my regular reading glasses, which in turn go in front of my eyes, which in turn sends the signals through a variety of chemical and electrical messengers, to the optical receptors which then generate an internal holographic display … oh, never mind.
Speaking of “mind”, the mind is good for sorting, but not for thinking.
So you’re going through the 3 Aspects of Coinology while searching for those elusive Time-Twister Dimes which will give you Perfect Resonance with the Past.
So your target for your search is … ???
Well, it has to be obvious or it can’t be true. You’re not actively looking for that 1983 no mint-mark Roosevelt Dime, are you? I hope not.
You SHOULD be looking actively and intensely for “DATE” Dimes, which are brilliant uncirculated or better, and carry the dates from 1965 through to the present time.
I DO mean BRILLIANT and UNCIRCULATED. If I meant “Okay enough to get by”, I’d have said so. The coins you’re looking for are so brilliant that the surface shines like a mirror.
This means you’re going to have to wade through tens of thousands of dimes to get that yield of PERFECT dimes that will generate at least one roll each of every date from 1965 to the present.
Okay, look at the reality — you’ll be less able to find good coins the farther back in time you search.
Your 1960s dimes will look a LOT duller than the 2017 dimes, but there is a relative niceness that you will eventually discover, and the coins need only be good for jewelry, which means “sharp and clear” not necessarily mirror-like and polished.
As a matter of fact, since it’s jewelry and will be worn down by wearing anyway, why not treat the dimes as simple jewelry findings?
If you don’t mind destroying the dime as a numismatic, and there’s no reason you should worry about that relative to clad Roosevelt “Rosy” Dimes, so go ahead and take them to the polishing cloth.
Yes, them to cloth. Place the coin on an inside corner of your polishing cloth and hold it there with thumb and forefinger while rubbing the surface with the opposite inside corner, until the coin shines and shows some softening and shadow.
You’ll be mounting the coins in .925 sterling silver bezels and selling the earrings for $65 a pair, which is very, very reasonable.
The earwires are surgical steel, to minimize the risk of skin reaction to the metal object, but if the buyer would prefer silver ear mountings, a post-and-ball with ring & nut backing can be provided at an additional $20 onto the price, to cover the cost, about $10 for the pair of ear backings, if silver stays cheap.
So in the Roosevelt Dime Search, you’re looking for a Prime Target of Perfect Significant Date Dimes to be mounted in coin-edged plain sterling-silver bezels.
They can also be mounted in an elegant hand-made fancy sterling silver filligree bezel.
A set of FANCY Sterling Silver Dime Earrings would sell for $125, again bringing you about $20 per dime, which is the same price you’d get for the average dime mint-error without the jewelry application.
Making the coin into coin jewelry improves the chances of selling the item in this market.
Everyone’s got junk-silver coins for sale, and in order to sell a coin these days, you have to beat the prices, and with everyone selling at a loss, below the melt-price, it’s hard to make a living from simple coin transactions.
Think of yourself as a money-changer at the temple, and it’s Monday morning.
So what I’ve done with the junk silver is to turn it ALL into sterling silver bezels. That way, it’s still a form of “holding silver” and yet it’s more sales-worthy than the junk silver, see?
Jewelry is different, jewelry is personal adornment. Coins are about the economy and the government.
Jewelry is about ME.
What date could possibly be more important than the date your customer was born, or was baptized, or confirmed, or graduated, or got married, or had their first baby, or got their first or best or favorite job, or died?
Okay, forget the “died” part, but you get the idea.
The date is not specific to a day, but it does underline a year. Generally, this will be a major event, but you never know — some reincarnated shopkeeper could come browsing into the shop, and demand a souvenir dime from 1839 because that was the best Fall Season they ever had.
Am I kidding?
No, I’m not. I have had customers walk into the shop and ask if I had anything from the year 1847 or 1848, because that was the previous lifetime’s death-date.
I myself managed to stumble into a .45 Colt Peacemaker and Boise Fast-Draw holster dating back to a real bad day in 1878, and I still have it today, use it for my fast-draw body workout.
You want to guarantee a workout every day? Make it fun. I make my workouts a LOT of fun by doing fast-draw and plastic-pellet target practice with non-weapon replicas that weigh exactly 2.5 pounds apiece, which is what I can manage for a ten-minute workout every day.
Keeps me in shape, gets me ready for the coming zombie apocalypse, which is any day now. Not to worry, I carry special insurance for zombie activity, don’t you?
It’s just pure wisdom to expect the good, the bad and the ugly — they’ll be here soon, and they’ll be hungry, tired, mad and heavily-armed.
So what has this got to do with selling Roosevelt Dimes?
Nothing.
I never promised I’d make sense, just that I’d pump out a number of words per night, the more, the better — I get paid by the word.
How much do I get paid?
Well, I used to get a dollar a word from “Omni” Magazine, 25 cents a word from “Tiger Beat” and “Monkee Spectacular”, same rate from “Teen”, “16”, “15” and “14”, all of which I’ve written teen love confession stories for at one time or another, and a dime a word for my ravings in the L.A. Free Press during the Wild Times, the Sixties.
Of course, back in the 19th century, “The Sixties” was an entirely different matter, involving a Civil War, Indian Wars and a rotten border dispute with Canada that almost cost me my job back in the day.
I had been working as a Senate Floor Field Operator, which meant that I swept, mopped and dusted the Senate Chamber once each night except for weekends.
You think that’s an easy job?
It’s a small world, but you wouldn’t want to have to paint it.
I don’t know if you’ve considered the fact that you’re getting the same money for an ordinary dime as you would from a special mint-error dime, but you are.
About $20 bucks is what you can expect from the average coin find.
Some error coins are worth a lot more, but they’re correspondingly harder to find, and you can’t count on them as a source of steady income.
You might find only one error coin in your whole life — ordinary coins made into jewelry doesn’t require luck. You can make dozens of pairs of “Significant Date” earrings and pendants a day, and when you run out of coin findings, you can run to the bank to get another box of dimes and go through them for what you need.
I guarantee that every date is findable in a decent jewelry grade, with the exception of the 2009 dimes, which you might have to buy, or find another denomination of coin for those born on that year.
If you wait to find one on your own, you might need to tell your customer that they may have to wait several months to get their pendant, and if it’s a PAIR of earrings with the 2009 dimes, they’d do better to take a different rebirth than wait for YOU to find them, and if they’re twins and they both want earrings AND a pendant, there go your Sundays.
What’s the deal with Roosevelt clad dimes, anyway?
Well, for one thing, they don’t tarnish anywhere near as easily as silver, and they certainly don’t get easily destroyed by normal wear as does copper, which can turn green, black and gray with a gentle puff of wind.
If you’re rich, you perspire. If you’re poor, you sweat.
The phrase, often heard among human animals, is “I sweat like a pig”, which makes as much literal sense as a Pinko Commie such as myself expecting fair treatment in a Red State.
Pigs just plain don’t sweat, not now, not ever did they sweat. It’s just a figure of speech.
Trump never sweats.
Trump wants a full military parade in his honor, so he can justify the increase in the military budget, and there’s bound to be a Pennsylvania Avenue Parade commemorative coin issued by the Trump Organization at the same time.
I’d get a couple dozen of those commemoratives on the day of issue, before the price goes through the roof.
What I mean is, when the people discover that almost a BILLION dollars, including wages of participants, will be spent on Trump for his own spectacle in his own honor, they’ll be so pissed, they’ll probably tear down Washington and trample it into the ground and that means those commemorative coin prices will go, as I’m predicting, right through the roof.
What will also go through the roof, unfortunately, is food prices, but don’t worry about that, as long as you have safe shelter somewhere near a triage medical care center.
If you’re thinking Donald’s action is crazy, you’d be wrong. He’s acting under orders.
It’s all designed to bring down the reputation of the FBI, the U.S. Military and the State Department, so Trump can declare a national emergency, and take over the whole thing as Dictator for Life, which is what HE means by “Pro-Life”.
It won’t work, it never does.
Oh, okay, once in a while, it works. It worked with Putin, it worked with Hitler, it worked with Mussolini, it worked with Lenin, it worked with Stalin, it worked with Pot Pol, it worked with Saddam Hussein, it worked with Franco, it worked with Rumanian Dictator Nicky Ceaucescu and his lovely wife Elena, and it worked with …
Hey, wait a minute.
Come to think of it, it ALWAYS works, because we’re dealing with bots here, not rational beings, and they tend to go with the conspiracy theories flying in the face of facts.
Okay, so a little adjustment in thinking is necessary. We can expect the zombie apocalypse a lot sooner than I’d be happy predicting.
The military parade down Pennsylvania Avenue is the biggest danger signal we’ve seen yet, signalling what Donald has in mind for Amerika and Amerikans.
If you’re anything but white, expect deportation at some point, whenever Trump can arrange it.
If you’re a second, or third, or even fourth generation immigrant, you can still be deported, under the new rules being signed into law this year, and if you’re from anywhere other than an Aryan State, you’re shit out of luck.
If you’ve lived your entire life in the United States, it will be a lot harder to get used to than if you’d come here from a dictatorship, but don’t worry, you won’t have to get used to it, because they have no intention of feeding you, just working you until you drop.
The infrastructure in Hitler’s Germany was designed to carry tanks. Guess what happens here next?
At some point, you’ll wake up with Russians all over the place, and Russia in control. It’s THEN that you have a chance, because YOU will have saved up tons and tons of MINT dimes with the Russia Takeover Date on it — maybe it’s this year!
DON’T PANIC — sell commemorative coin jewelry to the Russian “Storm Trumps” that are swarming all over your hometown!
BECOME A RUSSIAN OLIGARCH — You can get rich quick from the sale of commemorative Russian Landing Date Jewelry, and work your way into the good graces of Putin, as your fearless leader has already done, proving himself a worthy and loyal servant of his Russian master.
Donald, if you’re reading this, as I suspect you are, you are just now beginning to remember where you know me from, and I’ll tell you again what I told you then — “Put yourself on report, Mister.”.
Wow, did you ever think you could make a FORTUNE from dimes?
Stay the course, marshal your forces, get those dimes heaped up, ready for inclusion in a locket or necklace or beautiful pair of genuine sterling silver earrings, and be prepared for a rush on Russia Day when the Russians take over!
Wow, won’t Donald’s Dad be pleased when he sees that his son is NOT a loser, after all.
Loser Donald. SAD!
Haw, haw, just couldn’t resist a poke at that fat asshole once again. What a turkey, what a joke, what a maroon!
I’m delighted at the proceedings, and absolutely fascinated with the New Washington Reality Show, for several reasons, not the least of which is the generation of thousands of television and movie plots and turns, but also because if I manage to get the Coinology over, I get 10 points of Extra Credit from Mister Foster’s 21st Century Ancient History class, which puts me over the top for a C+ this semester, the highest academic grade I’ve ever earned.
As you might have guessed, I’m not the class valedictorian this year, but I’m not upset about it, I suspected a plot against me, a conspiracy, all along, just to prevent me from getting the World Humility Award again this year.
Donald wants it for himself.
He’ll never get it. There’s nobody humbler than me.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby