Lawrence Philip Larson and Blanche Cole walked down the street of middle America 100 years ago this week. They were 'Spooning', my Grandparents to be were on their way to the new
Nickelodeon. He pulls two Barber nickels from his pocket to pay their admittance. Boy, only a nickel! Seems really cheap, but is it? It cost about $7 each to get you and your best girl into the 'Movies' now.

Using a CPI comparison program that shows the CPI differences over a specified time period we find that a 1906 $0.05 would be valued at $1.05 in 2006 dollars. That nickel was not a bad deal at all if you are comparing just the price paid and not the quality. How would our hobby fare using this criteria as a comparison? Lets use forty years as I have a copy of both the 1965 Red Book and one of 2006 to use for comparison. In 1965 you purchase an extra fine 1932 D Washington quarter dollar for the full Red Book value of $57, and today if you sold the coin for a full 2006 Red Book value of $225 it would be a pretty good gain right?

Lets check the CPI. The $57 dollars in 1965 dollars would now be $342 in 2006 dollars. All things being equal we lose money on the coin. But things are not equal. In 1965, the next grade past XF was uncirculated which using todays grading standards would mean that the XF grade would encompass all grades from 40 through 58 on the present grading scale, and it is doubtful you would have given top dollar for the lowest possible XF grade so lets use an AU 50 value for our comparison. In AU50, the present value is $350, almost a perfect match to the CPI change. This, with a very few exceptions of much greater gain and a few of much greater loss, seems to be the normal outcome.

So, have our coins really gained in value over the years or have they just stayed the same after being adjusted for the cost of living changes? And is this bad? Had you placed that $57 in the bank in 1965 at 3% interest, about the going rate at the time and forgot about it, and the interest rate
stayed the same because you forgot to roll it over, your original $57 would only be $186. When we think of short term investments, we think in terms of profit or loss. But when we are considering long term investments, be it a bank CD or a stock portfolio or a coin collection, one's aim should be to
just stay equal.

In terms of buying power, the $350 would probably buy the same number of sacks of groceries now as the $57 bought in 1965, in fact maybe a bit more were it not for the goverments first claim of 28% of the nearly $300 'profit' you just made on the above coin; but then someone has to pay to pave the roads to the coin show.