coolpix9 said:
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.
) 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.
lol
awesome post. Thanks for the research. I agree that should be permanently posted somewhere.
