It's 2025 and One Year away from a Birthday Celebration Again. Do You know Where Your 1975 Dimes Are
cladking
Posts: 28,701 ✭✭✭✭✭
Everyone thinks these are common. Neither the Philly nor the Denver is. Rolls are very scarce and almost every single specimen that survives in a mint set is badly tarnished.
Only a few a day trade because there is no interest in "common coins". '75 mint sets trade mostly for the Ikes and half dollars they contain. Demand is very low on these as well.
Tempus fugit.
2
Comments
Yep. Cut from sets and rolled waiting for me to win the lottery to grade some.
Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value. Zero. Voltaire. Ebay coinbowlllc
Around $60 per roll on eBay. Proof rolls are cheaper.
My Adolph A. Weinman signature
There are some really nice specimens of these coins in mint sets. Both show up in nearly PL and FB are scarce enough to bother with and common enough you can find a few. It's about 1% for the Philly and a little higher for the Denver if memory serves. The Philly dimes usually can't be cleaned when they are bad (and they all are) because the tarnish won't come off. The '75 set is much worse than the '76. The BU's would bring good money if there were any demand but there isn't.
BU rolls are really tough and tend to be ugly though I used to see a few Denver rolls.
It's hard to give Proof rolls away. The demand is higher but the supply is much higher.
Ultimately, final demand for specific dates/mintmarks of uncirculated clad dimes is limited to those collectors who are assembling complete uncirculated sets. There aren’t many new collectors interested in this series, and even this small number is partially offset by older collectors or their heirs selling already completed sets into the market. For the foreseeable future I don’t see any catalyst capable of significantly boosting demand for these coins.
My Adolph A. Weinman signature
If demand is measured by prices, I've never heard or read a believable catalyst to "meaningfully" increase prices from anyone, outside of the FDR dimes with high(er) prices already. The very low series preference isn't random or a coincidence. It's entirely due to the coin attributes.
Hundreds or thousands of collectors buy things like '24-D or '31-D cents every day. It simply wouldn't take much demand for 1975 dimes to virtually disappear overnight,. I should hope the increase is collector demand but then people see opportunities and will often buy for "investment". No matter where the demand arises there is simply no supply for many of these coins. This is never going to change because the coins are gone. It's even difficult to find poor specimens in circulation any longer because these have had a nearly 4% attrition rate for many years.
I know I'm a broken record but still the coins are gone and the survivors still have a high attrition.
“Hundreds or thousands of collectors buy things like '24-D or '31-D cents every day.”
Perhaps, but thousands of collectors each day will not be buying 1975 Roosevelt Dimes at anytime in the near future. My guess: we are still about 20 years out before a large audience really starts to care. And, yes, I will buy the coins now for peanuts to set aside for the kids to deal with in 2-3 decades.
Wondercoin.
What's so different about the 1975 versus any other proximate date?
Financially, this thread is only meaningful for a very low number of large-scale hoarders. Aside from the coins already selling for high(er) prices now, what's supposed to make future collectors like the attributes of clad FDR dimes generically so much more than they do now or did in the past?
We're on the fourth generation of collectors since 1965, the year I was born. With current communication, relative preference especially for a widely collected series is evident almost immediately or at most within a few years.
I have one each for my collection along with the proof set. My quota of 1975 Roosevelt Dimes is filled.
Why would folks want Proof rolls of these? Certainly not as investment or roll hunting material. By definition they would be less-thans not worthy of slabbing or else they wouldn't have been dumped into tubes, so cherrypickers won't want them...and Roosie collectors doing sets only need one (see @erscolo comment above). I guess I'm not seeing the higher demand there.
RIP Mom- 1932-2012
Maybe they're hunting for a third example of the eluisive "no S" variety.
My Adolph A. Weinman signature
Only if they have no clue how proof rolls become proof rolls
RIP Mom- 1932-2012
The 1974 is usually untarnished in the mint set. When they are tarnished they can almost always be restored to pristine condition. The 1976 dimes in the sets aren't good but they are much better than the '75's. The 1975 Philly is especially bad and attrition on this set is probably higher because it's the "only" place you can get the type I philly ike.
I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean. Anybody can collect clad dimes and those who do will be affected by their pricing.
They are US coins.
Not all proof rolls are heavily picked over. There are numerous varieties and frosted Gems abound.
The biggest thing stopping them is the mistaken notion that the coins are common. I don't know how fast this can change.
>
I can see a collector paying a premium for a single coin, but not a speculator or investor buying multiple rolls unless they can be obtained very cheaply. Aside from the coin's illiquidity, there's always the chance that a 5000-coin bag that someone put away in 1975 will surface and instantly tank the price.
My Adolph A. Weinman signature
Oh, these aren't so scarce that 10,000 coins would have much affect on pricing.
Somehow people got it in their heads that there are millions and millions of these and it's this vast supply that is discouraging collectors. I'm not suggesting that these coins are scarce per se but rather that they are quite scarce relative the potential demand. Most of the clad dimes are scarcer than a '50-D nickel for instance.
1975 dimes will never be rare because a few have been set aside. Of course blazing Gems, PL's, or FB might be another matter. These coins were mostly made pretty poorly and odds are good a bag of them would not have any nice attractive coins.
I think they're tough in higher grades this is my best so far at 65fb.
edit: only 4 in 67 and 30 in 66.
Beautiful coin! These tend to have poor surfaces and a weak strike. Coins struck for circulation are much worse and also are plagued by overused dies and marking. This date is the most common date for nice attractive toning on all denomination clads.
Why do they tone so much? 1974 didn't and 76 toned yellow instead of blue.
Good question but I don't know. I know it is dependent on storage though because they run in batches of toned and untoned.
Maybe they didn't seal very good. I tend to find a lot of 75 Ikes like this with splotchy tarnish or toning that looks like humidity mixed with some oily substance where areas of the cellophane was in contact with the coin.
I dont think demand will change any until they change the series up. If I am not mistaken, it is the only coin in circulation that has not seen a design change since being minted. I am excluding halves since they essentially dont circulate.
The plastic yellows and cracks but the tarnish precedes this. Each layer of plastic is really three layers thick with a very soft one in the middle. It could be off gassing from the middle layer causing the problem. Where the plastic nearly touches the coin there is no gas but there is where there's a gap. I've long suspected that these stand up to age better if they are stored vertically but it's unlikely anything would protect the plastic. Every once in a while I'll see a '75 set that isn't too bad but even mine stored in temperature and humidity controlled environments went bad.
This really highlights just how weak the demand for moderns is. The '76-P Ike in the '75 set is a low mintage one year type coin that was so horribly made that only about 10% of the mint set coins could charitably be described as "chBU". This is as they were made but my 2002 the incidence of chBU coins had dropped a bit as collectors picked them out. Today there are few surviving sets and every single one has a tarnished Ike yet this coin wholesales for only $4. I believe only about 45 to 55% can actually be sold for this much after they are stabilized in acetone.
The dime is worse though since there are no BU rolls and a much lower percentage can be cleaned.
I used to believe this. I was really excited about the states program because I figured it would spotlight the old quarters in circulation as well. Some of the early proposals for this program applied to the larger non-circulating coins and I'd like to think I helped get them on the quarters by pointing out that the more coins that get saved the more coins the government can make at a profit. To get the public interested they had to get the coins in their hands.
There has been a lot more interest in the old clad quarters but much of it is centered more on the circulating coins and none of these will be scarce for another 10 years at the current rate of drawdown and attrition.
Some fundamental change probably has to occur at this late point in time. With the baby boomers starting to shuffle off ever more rapidly this might be sufficient. I can certainly imagine people in twenty years wanting coins in part as a reminder of their grandparents.
It just never occurred to me that scarcity wasn't sufficient motivation to interest any coin collector.
A design change would be a spur though. I suspect the dimes are even scarcer than the quarters and the attrition on dimes is much higher so finding dates like the '75's in circulation can be tough. But so long as people think of these as tokens rather than US coins I don't expect much collecting.