Like any hobby, coin collecting is a pastime that can split in two directions — one for casual pleasure and one for serious investment. A man and his mother, in the late 1970s, went into the rare coin market not to gather a collection, but to accumulate one single investment that’d pay off for the family decades later.
After the brother’s passing, the value of his investment surfaced. His three sisters from Ohio (who opted to be anonymous after receiving the coin) were shocked when they inherited this rare coin he had seldom talked about. As a dairy farming family, the brother, and his parents, wanted to create a safety net. Getting additional financial help from their mother, he purchased the coin in 1978 for $18,200 which would be close to $90,000 in today’s money. The big purchase went under lock and key literally, and it was seldom talked about, only one of the sisters remembers her brother speaking about the purchase.
What made this dime higher than ten cents is all based on a mistake. In 1975 San Francisco Mint produced and sold 2.84 million proof coin sets for $7. Proof coins are not your average pocket change. These coins are specially struck, created with crisper, sharper details, and a more mirror-like reflective surface. The 1975 San Francisco set had six coins in the package collection (they are set in place, making them hard to remove from the set) and each coin individually was valued at around $1.91 and all were supposed to be inscribed with a distinctive S mark, standing for San Francisco Mint. However, of these countless sets, two dimes depicting Franklin D. Roosevelt were missing this S mint mark, making them extremely rare.
As of 1979, there are reports of only two dimes with this mistake. One of the dimes surfaced twice and went to auction, selling one time for $456,000 five years back. The president of Great Collections Coin Auctions Ian Russell had been contacted by the brother several years before, informing him of the rare coin. Russell, who will be in charge of the dime’s online auction in October, talked to the sisters after their brother’s passing, and they couldn’t believe that it could go for an estimated $500,000.
Before its auction in the autumn, the dime is set to be on display at a coin show in Tampa Florida before going to the online auction, which ends in October. Coin collection and investing in this trophy was a lot of work for the brother. This dime wasn’t just the pièce de résistance for their coin-avid brother but also created an investment for their family which will surely pay off.
