I'm jumping the gun a little bit with St. Patrick's Day still a little over a week away but what the hell. It's not like I'm pushing Christmas right after Halloween or something. I wanted to make a post on my blog today. I've missed a few days and the pictures of my RCM 2018 $20 Lucky Clover are sitting ready to go.
I bought this coin because of the St. Patrick's Day theme. I have some irish background and so does my wife and besides that it's my wife's birthday. I bought last years lucky clover and if they keep putting them out I'll probably keep buying them. It's one of the themes that I'll continue to collect.
I like the maple leaf theme. I have quite a few different versions of the maple leaf bullion coins. I recently posted a 1/2 oz. silver coin with maple leaves. I've bought maple leaf shaped coins. I have a coin that instead of the regular maple leaf on a silver coin they had a silver coin with the leaves of silver maples on it. The regular maple leaf is a different type of maple. They have versions of the silver maple leaf bullion coins with different privy marks. I wasn't able to buy all of those but I have a few. Out of all the coins I collect I think the silver maple leafs with the various privy marks might actually stand a chance of having value over what I paid for them and possibly in my lifetime.
I also have a soft spot for coins that commemorate the original Canadian coin designs: the beaver, the Bluenose schooner, the caribou, the coat of arms, the loon and the polar bear. Recently I posted a coin with the caribou from the Canadian quarter on it. Two of my favourite sets are the Legacy of the Penny and Legacy of the Canadian Nickel. They are five and six coin sets. The coins are silver with selective gold plating. The Nickel coins have regular yellow gold plate and the Penny coins have rose gold plate to simulate the look of the copper penny. I don't have access to most of my coins at the moment but I might have to get them back and get some pictures for future posts. The Legacy of the Canadian Dime is out right now. I'm having really hard time not buying it. The set is $710 and I can't really afford to spend that kind of money on 7 oz. of selective gold plated silver that looks really nice. I've done it before but I'm not in the same financial situation as I was when I bought the other sets. Disability is a significant pay cut from what I normally make.
Just recently I ordered a few more coins (I'm cutting back slowly). One was a two coin subscription for the 30th anniversary of the RCM silver maple leaf. The other two were non-precious metal purchases. I like to get an uncirculated set of the coinage every year. I bought a 2018 uncirculated set. I also got a six coin specimen set of the 2018 coinage but the loonie in the set features a burrowing owl instead of the loon. I usually end up making a few non-silver purchases every year.
I'm trying to stop buying silver with the kind of premiums that I see from RCM collectible coins. It's one thing to pay a bit of a premium on silver bullion that has real collectible value, but I've never heard of any RCM collectibles that suddenly became a hot item in the collectors market. You pay five or six times spot price for a coin that has went through a quality control process to make sure that it's perfect but there are maybe 5,000 to 10,000 other people out there that have that same perfect coin. There doesn't seem to be a lot of people in the market trying get that one coin that they missed for their collection.
What I did find when I went looking for RCM coins for sale on the internet was a whole bunch of retailers that were stocking minted coins from past years with their own premium tacked on top of what the mints were already charging. It's not going to be worth anything to me to sell someone a coin for five dollars more than I paid for it. The retailers can afford to do that. If anyone needs a coin for their collection from one of the mints, it's ok because retailers everywhere bought one or two to sell just in case you missed buying them from the mint.
You'd think the way I'm talking that I'm trying to discourage people from buying coins from the mint. That's not really the case. A person just has to realize what they are actually buying. They're buying an expensive but beautiful silver ornament.
The value of collecting RCM coins isn't monetary for me. It's not the amount of return I'll see from buying and selling them. I may have told myself at the beginning that I was investing but eventually I realized I was just buying a beautiful piece of artistry in a medium that appeals to me. I love that I can hold bullion in my hand but having the perfect piece of silver that has never been touched has its appeal too.