Sell your coins in the Sacramento region

I buy US coins, collections, estates and bullion around greater Sacramento. One coin or a whole basement.

Email me photos and a rough idea of what you have. I will tell you what it is, what it is worth, and whether I want to buy it.

What I buy

US coins of every era. Half cents and large cents, Seated and Barber type, Morgans and Peace dollars, the 20th century series. Any grade.
Graded coins in PCGS, NGC, ANACS or ICG holders. CAC sticker or not.
Raw coins. Albums, folders, flips, rolls, a coffee can.
US gold, $1 through $20, plus modern Eagles and Buffaloes.
Bullion. Rounds, bars and generic gold and silver.
Pre-1965 US silver by the roll or the bag. Dimes, quarters and halves.
Whole collections and estates. Albums, the loose jar, the notes in the shoebox. All of it.
Tokens, paper money and world coins, usually as part of a bigger group rather than one at a time.

Usually not a fit

Copies and replicas, often stamped COPY on the reverse. Same for anything counterfeit.
Modern issues sold as collectibles: colored or gold-plated state quarters, tribute pieces, most late-night commemoratives. They rarely resell above face or melt.
Bucket-lot circulated foreign coins with no silver in them.
Cleaned or badly damaged coins, unless the date is scarce enough to carry the damage.

None of that is a hard no. A photo costs nothing, and I would rather look than have you throw something out. Odd and unidentifiable are fine.

How it works

You email photos and a rough list. Or just “my father left three albums and I have no idea”.
I answer with a number, a range, or the questions I need to get to one. No obligation.
We meet, or you ship. I set meets up by email, somewhere public, at a time that works for both of us.
I look at the coins, we agree the number, you get paid. Nothing is final until we both say so.

What to send in the email

Front and back of anything worth shooting. Whole coin in the frame, in focus, in daylight if you can. Don’t fire a flash straight at it. That hides the part I need to see.
For a graded coin, the label with the cert number readable. I can look it up before I reply.
For a collection, shoot the pages and boxes rather than every coin, plus a rough count.
For bullion, the weight and purity stamped on the piece, and how many you have.
Anything you know about where it came from. Who put it together, roughly when.

Please do not clean anything. A cleaned coin almost always sells for less than the same coin left alone, sometimes a lot less. The scratches a cloth or a dip leaves are permanent, and every grader sees them.

How the offer gets made

The number comes from the date and mintmark, the grade, the eye appeal, whether it is in a holder, and what that coin is trading at wholesale right now. Dealer sheets move on their own schedule. Gold and silver move by the minute, so anything I am buying for metal follows the metal that day.

A number off photos is always subject to seeing the coins in hand. Photos hide cleaning, rim damage, and the gap between two neighboring grades. On some coins that gap is most of the value.

I will also tell you which pieces carry the value and which are bulk, including when something is worth more at auction than sold to me. Take that and walk if you want.

Where I buy: greater Sacramento

Sacramento and the towns around it: Roseville, Rocklin, Folsom, El Dorado Hills, Elk Grove, Citrus Heights, Carmichael, Fair Oaks, Davis, Woodland, Auburn, Lincoln, Yuba City, and the rest of the valley and the lower foothills.

Everything runs through one inbox. I set meets up by email rather than having people drop in, and there is no phone queue. It keeps the photos, the numbers and what we agreed in one thread instead of scattered across half-remembered calls.

Further out, or out of state? Email anyway. For the right group of coins, shipping is worth arranging.

Send the photographs

Put roughly what you have in the subject line. “Morgan dollars, about 40”, or “inherited collection, Elk Grove”. Attach whatever you managed to photograph.