I'm sitting here typing with a hurricane bearing down on me. I've done what I can to prepare the house. I've packed away every coin I own in a manner that is safe or recoverable. The only thing left to to do is put myself into safe storage. Hurricanes are slow disasters with several days warning. While the path of the storm, winds and rain totals can be predicted, the exact results won't be known until I return to see if my little house is still standing. I may be able to get on with my life. Alternately, the house may be destroyed, in which case, I will still get on with my life, albeit in a different direction.
Currently, the house is paid for and the bills are low. Buying and selling coins makes it possible to pay all my bills without a full time job. If I need to bear the expense of an apartment, along with water and sewer bills, at least a part time job would be needed while I continue to build my coin enterprise. If faced with the prospect of starting over, I suppose I will do ok. I have family I can stay with until we drive each other crazy. I have a job which brings good paying work a few times a year. Take away any part of the equation, and no matter how I look at it, the coins offer a tremendous advantage: Hope.
I've talked to plenty of people over the years, offering encouragement to develop a side income separate from employment. Investing in real estate or precious metals or some other opportunity is talked about. Getting a business going, be it a diner or selling crafts at flea markets or installing window tinting...anything will work, as long as you are good at it. Most folks don't. That breaks my heart. There is so much opportunity out there to be seized upon if only one would jump at it. There may not be a fortune to be made, but improving one's situation is a matter of effort and activity. In my experience, simply making the attempt is usually enough to bring results.
Coins offer a unique opportunity. It's more knowledge based rather than capital based. One does not need a lot of money. If I want to open another restaurant, I'll need tens of thousands of dollars. If I want to buy an apartment complex, I'll need a big sack of cash and a line of credit. When it comes to coins, the more one KNOWS, the better the results. Cash helps, but you can get the cash without investing thousands. An investment of a few hundred sure would help. I'll need to give first priority to protecting from the storm those things that make it possible to get the coin operation back up and running in short order. With a few pieces of equipment, all I need to start making sales are a few coins. I can get those from coin roll hunting.
Camera
Tripod
USB Microscope
Laptop
Printer
Loupes
Books and Reference Material
Flips
Coin Scale
Postal Scale
With the equipment in this list I can make videos, post articles in my blog, stay in touch with all the fine people in the coin groups, take good quality photos of coins to post for sale or auction, and print up shipping labels. If it was all lost, $500 would replace most of it.
If all my coins were scattered far and wide by a tornado, I could get started again with around 30 bucks for a box of cents and some wrappers. I always find a few wheats. I see people in coin videos get excited with each wheat they find. It breaks my heart to see the rest of the coins tossed in the reject bucket. The money is not in the wheats, it's in the die varieties, and there are plenty of them out there. If I don't double my money on a box of cents I got skunked. Coin Roll Hunting gives me seed capital which I can put to good use: I hunt for coins at a good price, flip them for a quick profit, repeat. A key aspect of my operation in leaving the money in the coin account, reinvesting and repeating until I have a considerable surplus of cash. That's when I can take a profit, expand my selection to another series, or stock up on supplies. I keep a personal account to handle my household bills. I have at least enough in there to cover my expenses for a few months. I'm not selling coins to pay my electric bill. This invites desperation which inevitably brings costly mistakes. The coin account is seperate and must survive on its own.
If I did lose everything to a storm, I would still need a place to live and either savings or employment income to pay my bills. The coin enterprise can be restarted inexpensively. Once the ball starts rolling, I keep it going by reinvesting in marketable coins and necessary supplies. This week, a package of kraft envelopes. Next week, a case of flips. The week after, a ream of shipping labels. Each purchase gives me greater efficiency by reducing my cost per unit. When the time is right, step up to a case of padded mailers instead of the kraft envelopes. There are not many different supplies, and they are not prohibitively expensive, but buying small quantities of anything usually brings the highest price.
Lets put some numbers behind all this to figure out how much I'll need to regain my independence.
Let's go with the idea of $25 being a typical sale. For the sake of discussion, figure I net $5 on a $25 sale. That's 20% after paying for supplies, paypal fees, shipping. If that's all I'm earning on a $25 sale I'd be doing a poor job, but this makes it a conservative figure. $20 invested gets me $25 back. I'll need to reinvest $20 if I am to keep $5 and repeat the process. If I want to net $50 per day, I need 10 sales per day. Each sale requires a $20 investment, so each day of sales requires a $200 investment. From the time I buy a coin to the time I sell it and have the money in my paypal account is about a week. It can be longer, but to come up with a minimum amount, 7 days at $200/day says I need an investment of $1400 to earn $50/day. Repeat the process 4 times in a month, I earn $1500 in net each month from a $1400 investment.
These figures are back of the envelope ballpark estimates used to come up with some idea of the scale of the operation I would need. Experience shows I do better than 20% and it usually takes longer than 7 days to flip a coin. The fact that my monthly expenses are considerably less than $1500/month suggests a daily goal of 10 sales or $250 in total sales should be sufficient to allow me to recover from a storm.
The next step in this is to take the storm out of the equation.
Fire burns down the house...I'll be able to recover.
Lose/quit job ✓
Break leg, can't work ✓
Volcano ✓
Earthquake ✓
Flood ✓
Eviction ✓
Forest fire ✓
Landslide ✓
Tsunami ✓
Extinction Level Asteroid...still working on that one.
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