Casino tokens and high silver prices

This blog entry while not military in subject may be of value to many readers. Since you are all collectors of varying degree, many of you may have visited casinos and brought home some ten dollar silver center tokens as souvenirs or may even have a small collection of them. Over the last few years changes have occurred that you should be aware of. Casinos have ceased issuing and redeeming the silver center ten dollar tokens (and most other tokens too). That means that the tokens are now a finite item which should make them more collectible in the future and hopefully a good investment. Many of you can not or do not want to wait that long and may even be thinking of selling the tokens for their ever increasing silver value. Most coin dealers will only buy them as silver and will usually under estimate the actual silver content due to lack of knowledge. On ebay these tokens rarely bring bids equal to their silver or face value because the bidders will not pay more than that amount for the token including the postage that they know they will have to pay. Then the seller also has to pay the ebay and paypal fees so as a seller you will usually only get little more than half the silver value of tokens sold that way. Keeping all this in mind recently I saw some of the outer rings of the silver center tokens in a dealer’s junk box for a quarter each. Best quarter I ever spent. Now I can weigh just the outer ring without having to damage one of my tokens. The ring weighs 19.2 grams. The complete token, ring and the .999 silver center weighs 37.34 grams. Therefore the silver center weighs 18.14 grams of pure silver or .5832 oz actual silver weight. Multiply the current silver price by .5832 and you will have the actual melt value. The melt value of the gold plated bronze ring is any one’s guess. When you find a good silver buyer, if that is the route you decide to take, you could throw in the rings for free.