Tuesday 26 June 2012

Approaches to start your Collection

Collecting Approaches

There are several popular approaches to collecting coins. For example, you can collect by series, type, theme and date. You can start collecting commemorative of coins you use everyday such as 50paise, 1 Rupees, 2 Rupees, 5 Rupees and 10 Rupees or buy specially minted coins made by the Government of India including proof coins, uncirculated coins, mint sets. You can also collect foreign and ancient coins.

Types of Collections

1/ Commemorative Indian Coins - Government of India print many commemorative coins of different denominations every year taking a theme into consideration eg. Birth centenary of lokmanya tilak, commonwealth games, 150 years of Indian post, Reserve bank of India etc. (Check my list of Indian commemorative coins for different denomination in a separate post.). This is an easiest method of starting your collection from the commemorative coins in circulation. 

2/ Foreign Coins - There are several ways to collect foreign coins:
  • You can collect by country. 
  • You can collect commemorative coins of a particular country (eg. US, South Africa, UK etc.)
  • You can collect Euros. Although euro is one common currency but every country in European union has a different mark on the euro coin as an identity of that particular country.
3/ Paper currency - You can start your collection by collecting different paper currency notes from different countries and of different denominations. In India, you can find paper currency notes of different denomination and different designs.

Before starting your collection, do keep one pont in mind that its an hobby, hence try to collect the coins rather then spending money and buying the coins from online stores. Buying coins should be the last option and should be used only in case where you need to complete a set or for any particular reason. Try finding out different ways of collecting the coins rather then simply buying them from market. Trading coins from other coin collectors is a nice way of increasing your coin collection. Try making contacts and swapping coins from collectors.

One interesting way of collecting foreign coins is to ask for the coins from the foreign visitors in your country. Not much but just a couple of coins or paper currency. This will not cost them much and sometimes they even feel proud of contributing. Its a personal experience. Do give it a shot!!! You can also request your relatives visiting a country to contribute the left over change from their vacation or business trip.

Another way of collecting foreign coins and paper currency is to make friends from another countries and ask for their currency in return for the coins and paper currency from your local country. Its a costly method but sending paper currency would not cost you much. You need to be careful in sending coins and paper currency by post as its not allowed to transport currency via post, hence you need to be careful with the packing thing. I used to do it using old wedding cards, pasting paper currency inside the card and sending it via post. There is always a risk of not getting anything in return, hence you need to be confident of your relation with the person from other country and its purely based on trust.   

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