Coin Roll Hunting Version 2.0 Questions for the Masses

[coolpix9]

I would say I searched about 99% halves last year(2009). One of my questions for you experts is this.
#1 If you had a weekly budget of $5000 to invest/play with for CRHing, what would your best use of time be ? Dimes,Nickles,certainly not quarters, Halves ? What would the best return for the almighty buck be ?

#2 Is there anything wrong in taking some profit along the way ? I have been a silver whore since day one but storage has become an expensive problem.

#3 If you had zero responsibilities and all the time in the world, do you think you could make a decent living just doing the CRH thing?

I know there are a 100 answers, I am just interested in how some of you view this hobby/addiction.
Thanks in advance, Jim

 

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[fistfulladirt]

1) If I had a budget of $5k I would be doing halves only. I could do that now. It is too much of a pain to dump that amount. My time is too valuble for that.

2) Nothing wrong with profit. Silver in large quantity takes too much space to store safely, I use a safe deposit box at the bank. I sure hope it's safe.

3) I would have to pull 15,000 90% halves a year to be able to live the lifestyle I hold now, not including health care costs.

ffd

 

[jim4silver]

1. Halves only, maybe dimes on occasion to mix it up, but less than 2% dimes searching.

2. Nobody ever went broke taking profits. If I were you Coolpix, I would sell and put the money into gold (if you don't have any now) or even .999 silver bullion if you don't have any of that. 40% in the past had very low premiums to buy and sell. Right now you can get somewhat close to spot when you sell it, and if you know where to look you can find decent .999 rounds for not too much over spot. Also can get good deals on some types of gold bullion. If for some crazy reason they ever ban the melting of US junk silver coins, I believe the demand would drop quite a bit. Don't know why they would ever do it, but they could just as easy as they did for pennies and nickels not too long ago.

3. Only a person with extremely low costs of living could survive doing this. An area will dry up over time after the easy silver is harvested, then it is a matter of waiting for new silver to enter the system. Some on here who are finding lots of silver now who are fairly new to CRHing will probably not be finding as much in 6 months to a year (except for those getting 20 plus boxes a week all the time; they will find mini hoards more often than people getting 4 to 6 boxes per week).

I was not finding enough silver to pay for my beer supply the last few months I was ordering boxes on a regular basis, let alone living expenses.

Jim

 

[obediah]

If you got rid of your cell phone, burned wood for heat (in your cave ) in winter, grew a garden and put food away for it and cut every expense you could, yes you could potentially survive off of CRH'ing, oh and the absolute minimum cash flow to do it would be 5K too, really need more, more like 7.5K or little more to do consistent volume.
And yes I sold some (66 Rolls) last year still have near 200 left too; only sold the %40's, to keep cash flow up to maintain our average now of 11 Boxes a week.

 

[jim4silver]

2) Nothing wrong with profit. Silver in large quantity takes too much space to store safely, I use a safe deposit box at the bank. I sure hope it's safe.

ffd

FFD,

I am with you on the safe deposit box, but I don't really like it. I rent now, so I don't feel safe keeping my gold, silver bullion and numi coins at home. I cannot imagine having enough space in a safe deposit box to store junk silver, my SDB is already pretty maxed out from silver bars and rounds, etc. If I owned a home I would keep all my pms at home with a good burglar alarm system and hidden safe.

If for some reason the banks shut down (not a gold confiscation per se), I wonder how hard it would be to remove the contents of one's SDB?

I hope to get a home sometime in 2010. I am trying to balance getting a good low interest rate and catching close to the bottom of the real estate bursting bubble.

Jim

 

[Diver_Down]

2) Nothing wrong with profit. Silver in large quantity takes too much space to store safely, I use a safe deposit box at the bank. I sure hope it's safe.

ffd

FFD,

I am with you on the safe deposit box, but I don't really like it. I rent now, so I don't feel safe keeping my gold, silver bullion and numi coins at home. I cannot imagine having enough space in a safe deposit box to store junk silver, my SDB is already pretty maxed out from silver bars and rounds, etc. If I owned a home I would keep all my pms at home with a good burglar alarm system and hidden safe.

If for some reason the banks shut down (not a gold confiscation per se), I wonder how hard it would be to remove the contents of one's SDB?

I hope to get a home sometime in 2010. I am trying to balance getting a good low interest rate and catching close to the bottom of the real estate bursting bubble.

Jim

What you need is a good old fashioned treasure chest.

The above pictured chest has three separate unique keys with another keyed honeypot inside. Empty, it weighs over 200 lbs. Of course, the chest is worth more than any safe. It cost over 9k (personal deal, to a stranger on the open market it would sell for close to 15k).

 

[GMan00001]

I would say I searched about 99% halves last year(2009). One of my questions for you experts is this.
#1 If you had a weekly budget of $5000 to invest/play with for CRHing, what would your best use of time be ? Dimes,Nickles,certainly not quarters, Halves ? What would the best return for the almighty buck be ?

#2 Is there anything wrong in taking some profit along the way ? I have been a silver whore since day one but storage has become an expensive problem.

#3 If you had zero responsibilities and all the time in the world, do you think you could make a decent living just doing the CRH thing?

I know there are a 100 answers, I am just interested in how some of you view this hobby/addiction.
Thanks in advance, Jim

1) If you are purely in CRHing for the return on your dollar, there are much better ways to invest your time/money unless just dabbling a little as a hobby.

2) Nothing wrong with profit.

3) No. Unless you had a really good relationship with a bank(s) that allowed unlimited ordering and dumping, you would require searching so much volume that you'd likely either cause your banks to say that's enough and stop doing business with you because you are costing them too much money.

A quick analysis:
Facts:
* current melt value for a 90% half dollar is $6.06
* current melt value for a 40% half dollar is $2.48

Assumptions:
* You have $5000 that can be used for CRH
* You will average 10 silver half dollars per $500 searched (bags or boxes) and 2 of these will be 90% and 8 will be 40%.
* You will always have an accurate count and no foreign coins.
* You can sell at 95% of the current melt value and all other costs except the face value of the coins sold are already are already included in this value (no idea if that is accurate.)
* The current melt value will not change.
* Gas, Garbage, and other associated costs are $0 (obviously an invalid assumption).
* You can sell immediately once you pull the coins from circulation such that your $5000 base always exists to buy new boxes and the profits get used for living.
* You have an unlimited supply and dump banks and the time required to do a round trip to any of them is 30 minutes on average (no matter how many or few are actually used)
* Your pickup banks all will order any amount you ask for.
* You can search $500 worth in 20 minutes
* It takes 3 minutes to dump $500 worth of half dollars
* Bank hours are from 9AM - 6PM Monday through Friday and at least 9AM - 12PM on Saturday.
* Halves orders can be scheduled to be picked up at any time you wish.
* You had no help and had to do all the effort yourself.

With these assumptions you would get $25.36 for each $500 that is searched.

Since you can only afford to buy 10 boxes at once, that will be the order size.
On each 10 boxes you will get $253.60 and the pickup, search, dump, and travel times will equal 290 minutes (4.83 hours).

If you ordered 10 boxes/week for a whole year, you would get $13,188.24 which is equivalent to a 40 hour/week job paying $6.34/hour.
Now granted that is with essentially all expenses ignored and assuming a healthy find average.



Taken to its limit, you would likely only be able to repeat the buy, search, dump process twice a day and once on saturday for a limit of 11 times per week due to banking hour restrictions. If you picked up where you dumped and searched in the car or had special conditions at your dump bank where they just took the coins without counting them, you "may" be able to make a third time in a day....but it would be a stretch with these assumptions.

So at 11 times per week, you would get $145,070.60, but with my assumptions you would also be working 53+ hours a week that includes 6 days a week every week with no vacation. Also this still assumes essentially no expenses and an ideal situation where you are able to spread out order 110 boxes a week such that your $5000 is constantly "working".

Other considerations:
* At this limit you would also be likely to not have another job, so any insurance you had would be completely out of your pocket without any help by a company subsidizing you.
* The 660 miles per week that you drive assuming your car cost you $0.50/mile like the reimbursement rate is for mileage at my job right now that would add up to $17,160 out of your profits for gas and car related expenses.
* Searching through 110,000 halves per week is likely to quickly pull all the silver from your local area and cause your find rate to decrease as you get your own coins back more and more frequently.
* The odds of being able to work out this elaborate of a pickup/dump strategy without significant extra fees is unlikely. A fee of 1% would take $28,600 of your profits. A fee of $3/box on pickups would cost $17,160. Or a similar fee on dumps would cost the same amount. At this volume, it is possible/likely you could run into paying for both pickups and dumps.

So now assuming that you did pay a 1% fee for both pickups and dumps, had to pay for gas and the other assumptions still held. You would now be getting $70,710, still working 6 days and 53+ hours/week and would still be responsible for your own insurance which isn't cheap. Also, if the government also figured out a way to tax you, that would take another 25-40% off. I honestly don't know if this could be called self-employed or not, but it sure seems like it might be.

$70,710 sounds good, but with the time spent "working", it is essentially the same as a job paying $22.75/hour and 1.5x overtime pay for 13 hours a week.

Other negatives...
* Instead of getting an annual pay increase, you will likely get an annual pay decrease year after year as the silver is pulled from circulation.
* I only listed some of the expenses in these assumptions and many of them are very idealistic and not at all like real life.
* It is possible that you may go through long streaks where you find nothing and still hit the averages for the end of the year. If you hit the long skunk streak at the beginning of the year, you are essentially living on nothing.
* All the risk is on you.
* You may get investigated for money laundering or other things due to large volumes of coins being moved even though no crime was committed.


For my averages I used halfway between what I found in boxes and what I found in bags for 2009.
**** NOTE ***** If the long term find averages really were half of my averages in your area and you had to pay the gas and a 1% fee for pickup and dropoff due to volume, you would actually LOSE money on the year. And this still assumes that all other expenses are negligible (which they aren't).



Summary:
Although it may work in the short-term, or in small volumes for a little extra cash. Any effort to turn this into a living are very risky. It is best left for hobbyists.

 

[coolpix9]

Gman, all I can say is wow,wow,wow. That is a heckuva lot of work you put into answering my questions. Thanks you very much, Jim

 

[GMan00001]

Gman, all I can say is wow,wow,wow. That is a heckuva lot of work you put into answering my questions. Thanks you very much, Jim

What can I say.....I was bored lol

 

[scotto]

Many people feel that the silver market is heavily manipulated right now. Silver came unhinged in the ratio with gold, if the ratio was still the same (and thus non-manipulated), silver spot would be close to $70 per ounce at this time.
If it ever comes near that, let alone shoots up and over it (which is a real possibility in this ever-worsening economy), CRH will very quickly be about done, for silver anyways. Even if there is somebody stupid enough to cash in silver at a bank, there won't be a teller left that will let it go.

 

[Argentium]

Gman , that was a magnificent breakdown of silver mining for halves - that should be
required reading for all CRH-ers ! Awsome ---------- Argentium.

 

[drpineapple]

GMan00001 awesome post. Thanks for the research. I agree that should be permanently posted somewhere.

 

[Silver Stripe]

You should have bought that Armoured truck that was on ebay some time ago, park it in the garage and Walla- Huge Safe. HH Mark