So you’re looking for 5 ounce silver quarters? Hhmmm…If you are new to the silver market perhaps you mean 5 ounce silver coins of some type.
American silver quarters from 1964 and earlier are quite valuable these days because of the fact that they are 90% silver and 10% copper in composition however the certainly are not 5 ounce coins.
You can however get 5 ounce silver coins and bars and that could be what you are looking for.
So perhaps you have heard of silver clad coins but are wondering what exactly they are and how they are different than other types of silver coins out there.
For the sake of our discussion here we’ll assume that you are interested in American silver clad coins which is a good assumption to make since I don’t know a lot about other types of silver coins besides the odd 1 ounce Austrian Philharmonic bullion coin.
Bullion coins are quite a different animal from the silver clad coins we’re looking at here.
The phrase sounds a bit odd doesn’t it? Can there really be such a thing as scrap silver coins? Well sort of. These types of coins are also called junk silver coins which may be even more misleading.
When people talk about scrap or junk silver coins what they really mean -at least in the United States- is previously circulated silver coinage.
You don’t think that the quarters or dimes in your pocket are anything special right? I mean, you can buy yourself something refreshing to drink if you have 5 or 6 of them but you aren’t that sad to part with them and don’t see much value in them beyond what they will buy you.
The same was true for the silver coins that our grandparents and great grandparents used to use. Before 1965 all quarters, dimes and half dollars were 90% silver but no one really hung on to them as something special because of their silver content.
It was just money and money in that time was mostly silver.
(more…)
The Silver Peace Dollar
Today we are going to look at silver dollar coins and a few of the types of silver $1 coins that are available at present. We’ll also look at the value of these types of dollar coins.
Obviously in the past the value of a dollar coin was simply one dollar. However the face value is not always the same as the value of the silver content of a dollar coin.
There are different silver coins minted by different countries such as the Canadian silver dollar coins which the Royal Canadian mint first issued in 1935. We’re primarily going to look at the American silver dollar coins and there are a few different types of those to investigate.
There were also gold dollar coins but for the purposes of this article we’ll focus on silver coins.
The Trade Dollar was made from 1873 to 1885 and was produced because other countries at the time were circulating their own silver dollars and the US introduced the trade dollar as a competitor with slightly higher silver content compared to the Seated Liberty and Morgan dollars.
The Morgan dollar is a popular coin among collectors and one that you’ll find fairly easily at coin shops, on eBay and at other sources. The Morgan dollar was made from 1878 -1904 and again in 1921. The 1921 is the most common and there is an active collectors market for the coin.
You’ll also find the Peace Dollar made from 1921 – 1935. The Peace Dollar was made again in 1965 with a 1964 date. Those are few of the types of American silver dollar coins.
As for why we would want to purchase $1 silver coins obviously you might be interested in purchasing silver dollar coins because you just like them and they are collectors’ items. Alternately you may be interested in purchasing any type of silver for investment or savings purchase to protect your saving’s purchasing power in times of high inflation. Historically silver as been considered money as we’ve seen by looking at past silver coins but we don’t currently have any silver coins in circulation as money today.
There are the Silver Eagles that are produced but they aren’t something you’ll go to Wal-Mart and buy anything with. Basically the reason for that is that the increased inflation over time by the Federal Reserve has made the face value of the coins non-sensical compared to the metal content value of the coin.
Today’s quarter is not the same in value as the silver quarters of times past since the silver content of quarters made up until 1964/1965 is about $7.00 at today’s silver prices. Using sites like Coinflation you can keep up with the silver price points of various coins. So for example: if we look at the Morgan dollar we’ll find that the silver content of the Morgan dollar 90% silver and the other 10% is copper so that value the 26.73 gram coin at today’s prices is about $30.79 for one Morgan silver dollar.
So you can see that it’s worth now about thirty times as much as it was back in the day. Same for the Peace dollar. So despite monetary inflation, in other words the increasing amount of money in circulation either just printed up or created digitally by the Federal Reserve, these coins retain value since people have valued silver and gold for a long time.
While the paper money price of these coins goes up they continue to retain their purchasing power. As we saw in the Republican early presidential debate the other day the candidates were talking about the price of gasoline and Republican candidate Ron Paul mentioned that in the old days you could buy gas for a dime a gallon and today, essentially, you can buy gas for a dime a gallon as well. It just has to be a silver dime because the current silver value of a silver dime such as a Roosevelt dime is $2.87.
Now that’s a bit below today’s gas prices of about $3.60 cents a gallon. Of course about 60 cents of the pump price is tax so there is that to consider. I don’t know what the taxes were back when the silver dimes were being produced but when silver prices go up more you can expect a silver dime to keep pace with a gallon of gas more or less.
Recently when silver prices were up a bit more the value was enough to cover the pre-tax cost of a gallon of gas. so you can see how purchasing silver quarters, dimes and silver dollar coins today could help you in the future as we continue to experience a lot of monetary inflation with the QE programs by the Federal Reserve. We already had QE1 and QE2 and they are talking about QE3. We can expect that that new money will simply push up further the prices of things like silver coins and more people will be interested in acquiring them to maintain the purchasing power of their savings.
Where to Buy Silver Dollar Coins
So if you are interested in getting silver dollar coins to protect the purchasing power of your savings you might be wondering where you can buy these types of coins. There are a lot of places you can go to buy them. Obviously you can go to local coin shops or something like that and ask for Morgan dollars, ask for Peace dollars or even silver bullion if you are simply interested in accumulating silver.
If you are a collector you are going to want specific grades and mint marks and things like that rather than bullion bars. If are just looking to accumulate silver there a a few different ways to do it. One place to look is eBay. You’ll want to watch out to make sure that you don’t end up spending a premium over the spot price of silver since some of the eBay auctions are fairly competitive. You can find some good stuff on eBay though.
For example the Morgan and Peace dollars we were talking about earlier currently have a silver spot price value of almost $31. On eBay we see some going for about $3 over the spot price. You’ll even see some sell for at or below spot price but with these you’ll usually need to take into account the shipping required which typically makes up for the deficit.
Other places you can look for these types of coins especially if you want to buy bulk are places online such as the Northwest Territorial Mint which sells a variety of silver dollar coins. You can get 90% silver bags of Peace dollars or Morgan dollars. For a tenth of a bag (which contains 77 oz) you could expect to pay about $3500 dollars at this point. This works out to about $45 an ounce which is a bit on the high premium side. You can get bullion for a smaller premium over spot at times and sometimes you will do better with 90% silver circulated coinage.
There are a variety of places to look for if you are interested in buying silver dollar coins. Dollar coins won’t always be the best deal on silver however sometimes they will be and you can get large bags or single coins depending on your needs.
Basically silver dollar coins are a great way to get started saving some money in silver. They are recognizable currency to some people who still have a little bit of familiarity with using silver currency. They also have a face value so if you are really worried about the price of silver going down dramatically (which is kind of ridiculous to think about right now but it could happen in the future) you’ll still be able to spend them for the face value price of one dollar.
While this site is primarily about silver quarters we shouldn’t exclude the quarter’s little brother the dime which was also made of 90% silver until the mid 1960s.
In the past the smaller size of dimes and the low price of silver made acquiring any significant amount of silver in the form of silver dimes a bit of a bulky enterprise. Now with silver prices hovering around $40 per ounce there is a lot more dollar value for each small coin than in times past.
The dime was first established as the tenth-of-a-dollar denomination coin by the passage of the Coinage Act of 1792. While the dime was initially composed of just under 90% silver from 1796 to 1837 the silver content was bumped up to 90% silver when the Seated Liberty dime was released.
The types of silver dimes likely to be of most interest to collectors are the older coin types and any of the later editions that exhibit errors or other features that differentiate them from most of the general circulation coins.
The older variations of silver dimes are the:
The types more likely to be of interest to silver investors are the:
The reasons to be interested in buying silver dimes are generally identical to those for purchasing junk silver quarters. In times of increased monetary inflation and financial instability real assets and goods are generally valued more highly than at other times when confidence in fiat currencies created by governments is still fairly solid.
Since we appear to be in an extended period of instability and turmoil many people are turning to the silver coinage of the past since it was more honest than the coinage in circulation today with it’s zinc and copper composition but unchanged face value.
Although dimes and quarters can be a slightly more inconvenient way of accumulating silver due to more complicated calculation required to determine the dollar value of a given quantity of coins they do have some other advantages over generic bars or rounds. One of these advantages is simply the familiarity that the general public still has with the idea of silver coinage.
Though these types of silver coins have not been in circulation for years many of them still look very similar to the base metal coins we use today and still think of as “money.” Theoretically this should make them easier to trade and barter with if the current monetary system deteriorates to the point that today’s debased coinage is not widely accepted by merchants.
So if you’ve been interested in silver quarters don’t hesitate to take a look at silver dimes as well since they have most of the same advantages and and are really just smaller versions of their quarter-dollar relatives.