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Here is a question I'm sure many of you have dealt with and is kinda new territory for me. My son who is 7 is starting to have more friends over the house after school and on weekends. Typically Ill have 8 or 10 boxes of halves sitting around or in the process of searching as well as other large amounts of coin. So my question is do you try to hide the coin as much as possible or do you embrace the curiosity and teach them a little about coins. I just fear that some day this could make me a potential target for stealing...

When I was a kid, one of my classmate's parents were jewelry business owners. They brokered diamonds and gold. (In fact, I ended up working for one of the classmate's siblings briefly in his mail order business fulfilling gold orders a bazillion years ago. That guy never bothered to educate us about precious metals but we did get paid under the table and got paid OK wages for the time.) He never told us what his parents did for money. We did not ask either. His parents told him not to tell people what they did. I think they feared being robbed at home or maybe just did not like the idea of being boastful having a successful career. Probably the former. We were kids and thought money was something that just magically appeared in adults' possession for some reason. My advice is not even let your child's friends know about your coin searching. They might get their own ideas about what other things are in your house or they might talk about it with their parents and their parents might think you are some kind of kook. Heck, being a kook is not really what I meant to say, but many people just don't think about what is happening with our currency.

I keep my coins out of sight as best I can to avoid becoming a target. I read a post not long after joining RC about disposing of the thousands of coin wrappers. I still laugh about the little old lady who confused the plastic coin wrappers with condoms!

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Nobody needs to know what's going on at my place - not the neighbor kid or the garbage man.

I am good with my kids sharing this hobby with their friends - but only in such a way that they have no idea of the scale we operate at. They had a friend over last Saturday helping search the box in which we found 38 40%'ers. My son showed him some of his collection and then put a nice 1967 in a flip for him to take home so he could start his own collection with a coin he found himself. Hopefully that doesn't cause me any competition or I might have to take him out.

Dont let them in....or hide them well.

I'll add, if you want your kid and his friends to learn more about coins, Gresham's Law, and maybe saving money ( yikes, never listened to my father on that last one; he was right I found), try to nudge them to learn it organically, maybe with an 'aha!' moment. The way it hit me was that metals are real and will always be utilized. Now, how much they go for as commodities and value is something I have a long way to figure out, but I know they are always going to be needed. If the kids could learn about metal via scrapping, maybe aluminum cans or something, and then see that coins have metal in them, well, and see on coinflation.com the spot value of that metal, they might catch on and it will create an impression with them. I think back to my brother's coin collection many years ago. I remember seeing Franklins and Barbers and Mercuries and Morgans and who knows what else, and I was clueless. I actually did not even think of the coins as being spendable. They were not Washington quarters or Eisenhower dimes. Not recognizable to me as money. I remember him dipping silver coins in some cleaning solution too, lol. Cool thing is, if kids can get started early saving and being motivated about, say, coin collecting, they have tremendous energy to keep at it. I get disgusted sometimes with it myself.

I hide almost all but the pennies and nickels. I let people think I'm nuts with them, that's my cover - if they consider me and money in the same thought they'll think what I have is nearly worthless and too much trouble to deal with.

Put a 45 on the sorting table and they'll remember that when they get of sticky fingers age, not the coins.

put'em to work.. are you kidding...

68Camaro wrote:I hide almost all but the pennies and nickels. I let people think I'm nuts with them, that's my cover - if they consider me and money in the same thought they'll think what I have is nearly worthless and too much trouble to deal with.

Great minds think alike. Pennies get no respect, so when the kid has his buddies over to play poker in the basement, I leave the Ryedale out with a jug of Lincolns. I gave them a demonstration of how the machine worked one time, and all the eye rolling let me know I was safe.

Silver colored coins have too much of a psychological impact on people, so those always get locked up in a cabinet before company comes over.

I have pennies visible, but nothing else. I also burn all the wrappers and boxes that I don't keep. Great fire starter for the fire pit.

I hide everything. Even pennies. I figure nobody will break in to steal boxes of pennies, but if they see hundreds of dollars of pennies sitting around, they may wonder what I have in higher denomination coin and/or cash laying around.

I also hide it when bringing it into the house. All coin wrappers are put into black garbage bags that are not put out to the curb until the morning of garbage day. I don't want any potential garbage pickers overnight finding them.

As tempting as it might be to tell them, you probably shouldn't. It's fun to show off, but it's a bad idea. I already wish I had told less people, and I've basically only told my family (you never know who they might tell).

JerrySpringer wrote:They were not Washington quarters or Eisenhower dimes. Not recognizable to me as money.

First Truman dimes, now Ikes. I never knew there were so many modern varieties!

Thanks everyone for all the insight. I agree it should be kept out of sight out of mind as much as possible. Especially the halves. Ill just have to stick to sorting pennies when kids are over and embrace the crazy penny guy persona

agmoose wrote:I have pennies visible, but nothing else. I also burn all the wrappers and boxes that I don't keep. Great fire starter for the fire pit.

+1

agmoose wrote:I have pennies visible, but nothing else. I also burn all the wrappers and boxes that I don't keep. Great fire starter for the fire pit.

+1

scyther wrote:As tempting as it might be to tell them, you probably shouldn't. It's fun to show off, but it's a bad idea. I already wish I had told less people, and I've basically only told my family (you never know who they might tell).

that's the problem. Kids talk... and that gossip can go ANYWHERE

I have no problem showing everyone all of the pennies I have collected... Heck... They always ask me what the heck I have saved them for, and then I give them a little demonstration. They look at me like I am nuts... I look at them like THEY are nuts.. and we then go and drink a beer!

I have only showed one friend some of the silver I have collected.. but most of my stuff is in a safety deposit box.

beauanderos wrote:that's the problem. Kids talk... and that gossip can go ANYWHERE

Ya and I prefer to be a hermit when it comes to my PM's, only my fiance knows of and where they are. I sort/stack in private.

-The Great