[Vermont Lt]

How about gold coins?

At least stamps retain their face value.

[conservaterian]

At least stamps retain their face value. Not really. You can buy unused sheets of stamps at many stamp auctions for less than face value. I get a lot of calls about stamp collections. If someone put some decent money into them 40 or 50 years ago then they are probably worth some money now. If they built their collection from stamps cut off of envelopes or bought in 100 for 25 cents packets, they are worthless.

[MarkL]

How about gold coins?

Something that gets me really angry are the commercials on TV advertising copies of the US buffalo gold coins. They're betting on the ignorance of people who hear about the way gold prices have skyrocketed, yet the coins, plated in genuine gold, are relatively inexpensive. I have a cousin who's schizophrenic who told me about this, and how he was going to buy some of those coins to invest in gold! I talked him out of it, explaining that the coins were plated in 14mg of pure gold mean that he would have to buy 2000 of the coins in order to get the 28grams of gold that would be 1 oz (OK, so I fudged, but I wasn't about to try to explain to him the difference between troy and av oz). Thankfully, I was able to talk him out of it. But I wonder how many people were taken in by this scam.

Mark