Good-Looking Franklin Half Dollars—In Extra Fine, Please
An examination of the Franklin series of 50-cent pieces and the bargains lurking among them in the Extra Fine zone.
We have covered a lot of different possibilities for classic United States coins when it comes to bargains and potential bargains and will admit that oftentimes, we focus on coins in the various grades of Mint State. For the past few decades, the tastes among collectors appear to gravitate towards such beauties, which is certainly not a bad thing. This focus seems to be pretty closely aligned with the creation over the years of huge commemorative coinage programs among the world’s mints and the absolutely gorgeous artistry and technical achievement that goes into producing them. Right along with this has come a tidal surge of precious metal bullion coins in gold, silver, and now platinum and palladium, once again made to precise, exacting, and utterly beautiful standards. It is perhaps logical that all this leads to a desire for us to look at all our coins in terms of them being Mint State. Curiously, though, this avoids or forgets an interesting fact: Mint State coins basically never did what they were supposed to do. They never circulated or were part of real transactions. So, let’s adjust our focus a bit and look at a favorite among classic United States silver, but in a different light. Let’s examine the Franklin series of 50-cent pieces and see what sort of bargains lurk among them when we stay in the zone of Extra Fine – that’s EF-40 – coins, or maybe slightly better.
The Baseline Costs
As always, we should establish a baseline for the Franklin half dollars in terms of how much precious metal is in each one. OK, each of these contains 0.36169 troy ounces of silver. Therefore, if silver trades at $25 per ounce on the world’s commodities markets, this translates to $9.04 per coin. Let’s also look at the lowest mintage in this series – a series that ran from 1948 to 1963 and encompasses 35 coins, assuming we take all the mintmarks into account. We’ll ignore the doubled die reverse, proof 1961. That low point is 2,498,181 pieces and belongs to the 1955. The 1953 is only a little bit higher, ringing in at a bit over 2.6 million.
It does not take too much by way of higher math skills to recognize that even the most uncommon of the Franklin half dollars isn’t – uncommon, that is. Just under 2.5 million coins tallies up to a lot of half dollars and certainly represents a total that is big enough that any collector who wants one can land one.
Highest Mintage
With a low point that is not really all that low having been established, well, what are the big mintages in the series? It turns out there are plenty of dates and mintmarks that are more than 10 million, with almost 10 more than 20 million – and one of those 10 at more than 67 million! Yes, the 1963-D comes in at 67,069,292 as its official tally. When it comes to 50-cent pieces, that is one big number.
When we look through the entire series, it actually becomes pretty obvious that this is a series without any real rarities within it. We might go further and claim it is a series that does not even have anything that qualifies as scarce. Some of the proofs might meet the criteria, but even several of those gems have mintages in the seven-figure zone.
So, Extra Fine Franklin Halves
Well, the moment of truth comes when we look at a price list, either in an issue of Numismatic News or in some other source, possibly an online one. If we stick to Extra Fine Franklin half dollars, those in EF-40 condition, we get a whopping $9.25 to $9.50 per coin as the price. That’s it. Alright, maybe a couple of the less common ones check in at $10, but nothing goes above and beyond, as it were.
What we have just discovered is that the entire series of Franklins qualify as half dollars that really command not much more than bullion value, even though the entire series is 90 percent silver and even though these pieces are still in pretty good shape.
How About Almost Uncirculated?
In possibly the most obvious next step in the history of both obviousness and next steps, we have to ask ourselves: what about the prices of Franklin half dollars as Almost Uncirculated, or AU-50, coins? The answer is almost as good as what we just saw. The lion’s share of these pieces that are a single grade above Extra Fine will still cost $9.50 or perhaps $10. The 1949-D and the 1952-S each begin their climb and cost about $30 each. But overall, the big jump for most of the Franklin half dollars tends to be somewhere in that Mint State zone that we have decided not to fiddle with, at least not for the moment.
The Challenge?
In past columns, we have discussed the challenge of finding bargains, often in a series where the collector demand is high, along with many of the price tags. Here we have a series that a lot of collectors know and love and that we might say lives permanently in the shadow of their more popular siblings, the Walking Liberty Half Dollars. But we have found that the entire series is very common and that the cost of any piece is very close to the bullion value in it. All we have to do is accept a small amount of wear on each piece. With the cost being this low, perhaps the challenge is to use a set of these halves as a gift, possibly to entice a friend or relative into the joy and fascination of the hobby. After all, this certainly appears to be a series of bargains.
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