Revenant

So... I'm confused... what is this app going to do? The.problem with scanning / messing with images of money is governments don't generally like it. I've had to resort to mostly using MS Paint of all things to crop my scans I make for the registry here because Adobe Photoshop recognizes images of banknotes, flips its lid and auto-closes on me almost every freaking time. If you try to release an app with high resolution banknote images or if you're distributing such you might even have legal troubles from it. I wouldn't think it worth the risk.

I'm 34. So a bit on the younger side compared to many on these boards I guess. I don't think I'd recommend note or coin collecting as an investment and I don't think I'd buy in hopes of recovering value or making a profit later. I built my Zimbabwe set - which is the lions share of my note collection - knowing pretty much the whole time that I'd be very unlikely to get my money back or make a profit because interest in those has mostly trended down as we get further from the hyperinflation and prices have come down big time in the last few years. The recent release.of a new series has sparked new life and interest but I remain convinced that the long term trend for everything in that set other than maybe the 100 Trillion note is down (not that it has much further to go now, they're down so much lol).

Thanks, again. Yeah, but not the worst problem to have. I don't know exactly what's gonna happen when the NGC one gets here though. I'm also out of the little plastic stands that I use for them. I guess I need to hit up Michael's and see if they still have those. I had a spare one sitting around that I bought a year ago for... reasons (possibly linked to eternal optimism)... and I was able to just pop the PMG one on that stand. Maybe the solution is just going to be hanging them on the wall in a big (and possibly growing over time) display. The stand the PMG one is on was supposed to be for my AIChE "Best In-Practice Paper" award but I realized that keeping that plaque (made of soft wood) would leave indents and grooves in that plaque over time so I took that award off the plastic stand and put it on the wall and that stand has been sitting empty. Now it has something to do. I think the single most hateful thing Amazon has done to me in recent years is starting to mail out those holiday toy catalogs... Ben has not yet figured out the difference between business cards, gift cards, membership cards (like my Top Golf card) and Credit Cards. So he has a wallet full of "credit cards." Uh huh... The below gives you outside, but I'd put INSIDE at about 212 mm wide and about 125 tall at the edges (the "spine" / lid is curved). It's big enough to hold my world notes in the wider, taller holders. I would say they're reasonably sturdy for what they seem designed for. They seem like they're meant to sit on a bookshelf and look like a book, not to be stacked really high on top of each other. They're pretty sturdy if gripped at the bottom or the sides but I'd say that trying to hold them at the top / by the lid in the middle is a bad idea. They are just a little "squishy" at this point and I can feel them start to give some if I try to hold them hard enough at that point to hold them when they're full / have the weight of a bunch of notes in them. No complains. I like them. I just would be aware of that one apparent weak point and that they don't seem designed to be held by the "spine" like you would a real book.

So I'm outside in the driveway cleaning out trash from my wife's car (it got a bit trashed when we resorted to camping out in it for warmth the week of President's day) and the mail carrier drives up and drops off this yellow padded envelope - which is a complete head scratcher to me because I wasn't really expecting anything. I open it up and it's the PMG "Best Presented" Plaque - just the PMG one; I'm guessing the NGC Journal one is coming soon and on its own. I'm really shocked at how fast NGC and PMG have been on getting these things out the last couple of years considering what I know of how long it takes to just get these things made by a 3rd party company and delivered to you. They must be getting the orders over to the award company almost as soon as the announcement is made or even sooner / before the announcement to get them out to us this fast. I was really shocked to get my Journal Award last year on March 2nd but PMG has done one better this year by getting it in just before the end of February. I'm going to be really happy if the NGC one comes early next week and they repeat last year's fast turn-around on the NGC side. I can't say I could at all blame NGC if they're a bit slower getting theirs out this year than PMG - they have way more to send (like 5 times more) and they're sending out those special coins this year (Side note, but I'm super curious about what that coin is going to be... Did they ever say publicly?) As soon as I opened it and saw what it was I showed it to Shandy and Sam was right next to her. He immediately flipped out and demanded that it be given to him and took an immediate shine to it. Seriously. He seemed really into it. I think because it is black and, yet, somehow still shiny. I eventually got to have it back... I gotta say, it is a trip to get to have "Best Presented" awards on the NGC and the PMG side. Maybe it's time to start some shenanigans on the Comics (CGC) side? (Wife seems very firmly opposed to this lol) It has been a stressful few weeks here in Houston. This brightened my day in a really nice way. Edited to add: Also last week I got my 3rd note storage box and finally got my notes all in the new boxes, taking some time out to do that as "me time" as a break from cleaning the house. I had to cram the two boxes of Zimbabwe notes a little more full than I prefer for the convenience of flipping through so I could fit them all. I definitely need a 4th box soon / at some point. Especially with some plans / hopes to add to the Zimbabwe note set soon with some graded traveller's cheques.

So those boxes my wife got me come in 4 colors - black, blue, red and green. She got me black and blue. I ordered myself a red which is coming soon. However - it would seem that getting green just isn't so easy! Almost every seller I found is sold out of Green. The only seller I found with them was 1] changing more than anyone else was for the boxes (about $30 where most were charging $20-25 after shipping) and 2] charging a premium for Green (Red was about $29, blue was about $30 and green was a little over $31). So what's up with green? The first thing that springs to mind is that it is essentially PMG's chosen color and that might make it preferred by some but I also know PMG isn't the only grader. I see other companies used in my Facebook and Redit groups - I just personally have never gotten anything other than PMG for graded notes. It's also the main/ dominant color of money and "the greenback," if you are an American or collect US notes. I'd love to have all four colors represented on my shelf because I'm a weird, collecting freak - maybe just a couple of steps shy of being a hoarder - but I'm just not willing to pay 60% more for a different color. 🤷‍♂️

It's basically the same as the junk desk hutch compartment I'd been going with. 😆

My collection of graded notes exploded in the last couple of years as I've worked on building the Zimbabwe collection. My storage and organization has lagged far behind with the notes just in large plastic sleeve that hold up to 8-10 notes and having those stacked up. It actually made things a bit of a nightmare for me when trying to look through and enjoy the notes because they were just hard to manage like this. My wife and I exchanged Valentine's presents early this weekend and she gave me some graded note storage boxes that look like old books on the outside. They are different colors (I think they're available in 4 colors) but they also have a small label pocket for saying what's in each one. She got me 2 to start out but I'm going to get to add a 3rd in a couple of days and take advantage of 5% eBay bucks at the same time. I'd initially been linked to these on eBay by another reddit user when I saw a post by that user showing one. I've had the impression that my wife might have / might be getting me some of these. This paradoxically in the short term made my organizational practices even worse - I lost all interest in fighting my old system to try to get things in order and sort in new notes when I knew these might be coming in a week or two. And, they would have been coming, because if she hadn't bought them for me they probably would have been the next thing I bought myself. I got really excited when I saw these in that reddit post and saw that the price was reasonable ($20/box). I've been wanting something like this f or a while and prefer something like this to albums and pages. I clearly haven't finished putting all my notes in them yet but I can already tell they're going to make life so much easier when dealing with my notes.

Meh. Maybe... Not really something I feel a burning need for.

Interesting. So I guess the PMG holder doesn't block UV and you can still see the UV features in graded notes. I have a UV light I might actually use now...

Ha! Suffer!!!!

So, I knew going into this and in making my other post that the old Travellers checks are pretty out there and common and available... As long as you don't insist on them being uncanceled / unused... (Geeeze! That is a heck of a lot of money!) But I'm finding that the Cargill Checks (P 13-14 and P 24-27), may just only be available much more rarely and at prices I am just 100% not willing to pay for them, short of me winning the Mega Millions. However, the more I look at them the more excited I get about the idea of buying and collecting some of the old fuel ration coupons from ~2005. And if PMG is willing to grade them I could see them either being included in my current "Gradually, Then Suddenly," and / or becoming the focus of a new Signature Set / Collection. These are very interesting to me as much as anything because you have the Reserve Bank issuing ration coupons and not the government or some other part of the executive branch. So I feel like that makes these very much adjacent to the Bearer Checks and Agro Checks as collectables.

Thanks for that. That and a bit more research my form the basis for starting a comment on my P-104. If that's happening they'll abandon the new dollars officially soon enough.

Thanks a lot. It meant a lot. I was very happy to get it and I appreciate your message.

Totally. Happy to do that, once I pick something to buy anyway.

I'd be quite surprised if it ever won another major award - pleasantly, but very surprised. I'm hoping it's not QUITE that bad, but I'm hoping to start buying some of the notes I need at the start of February. I'm also not ruling out adding some new varieties and replacement / non-replacement notes to compliment what I have already, which would also add more slots over time.

So the 2020 PMG Registry awards are in the books and PMG has paid my work / writing another very high compliment: The $500 grading credit that this comes with is going to open up a great opportunity for me get get some notes in my set that I don't often see come up for sale already graded by NGC and get this set more or less "complete." I don't have the financial resources or the facilities to bulk grade notes or to sell a lot of notes that I don't need. I'm also not all that great a grading notes and making sure that what comes back are gem 66+ notes. Given this, and given the fact that these notes often come up for sale in high gem grades at prices that are only slightly higher then what it would cost me to buy them raw and take the risk on grading myself, it just hasn't been economically viable for me to try to go it alone on submitting up to this point. This grading credit is going to give ma a guilt free pass to buy some travelers checks and Cargill bearer checks and a couple of missing 2nd dollar checks and submit them for grading. i'll get to build out the last few parts of the run where I don't have much and not feel bad about "wasting money" or making a bad pick / bad "investment" if the grades that come back are less than impressive. As a kind of "declaration of intent" I've gone back this morning and added some slots for these notes - bringing the total number of slots up to 124. I'm still not going to add slots for a lot of sub-types and varieties that I don't have at this time. I think If I added those in I'd be somewhere in the neighborhood of 150-160 slots. I'm still interested in maybe one day getting to the point of having all the sub-types / varieties for all the notes but that wasn't part of my original goal for the set and I'd be extremely happy just to have every pick number represented - or really close to it. The last 3rd dollar note that I don't have, the P-72, is probably not going to be part of this effort. I'm probably still just going to leave that alone and leave that slot empty for now.

Ya know, if my prattling-on encouraged someone to dump a couple of G's in the span of 2 months just for the joy and pleasure of hammering me into the dirt on rankings, I'll take that compliment. I don't talk about this part much but, part of my motivation in building "Gradually, Then Suddenly" was that I really liked this series and found the history interesting but when I brought them up a couple of times on the NGC side a few people kinda dumped on them and dismissed them as "just big numbers," etc (A quote that was in my description for a while there at least, it torqued me off so bad... Anyway...) That set was created, in my head anyway, to show just how cool and interesting that set, the series and the history could be and prove them all wrong. I think I succeeded.

Oh yeah! It's a less desirable, less valuable note that earns about 5% of the points of the other if the label is correct but PMG made a mistake! Let's pile on and act like some data-entry person at PMG hitting a instead of b makes this very common note somehow more valuable. Never mind that the note is worth about $20-25 on a good day usually. I guess there's a chance that there are slab / holder collectors out there that would like it but I have no interest personally. A true 48a, with an AA prefix I might add. A type B, from the same AW prefix run that the error label note comes from.

Yeah... They are buying Zim dollars from P-1 to P-104 at a pace that is mond boggling to me and the same thing for Venezuelan Bolivar. I have zero interest in playing that game. They can have it. 😆

Sorry, man. I never saw this, but, yeah. That looks like 48b to me, which is a big problem because 48a is a lot rarer.

Got some other money burning holes in your pocket thinking about it?

I'll get to that eventually... My 1 Billion and 10 Billion notes are on a short list of high priority / high likelihood upgrades but I'm just finding myself in no rush in general with Zimbabwe right now. I'm actually doing some things with my wife that have me getting much more into my other love at the moment - photography.

Yeah... If we're not there already I supposed we will be soon. Thanks! I'd been debating whether or not to say something about it or post about it but I'm just not sure what I'd say. 😅 I only found out about it when Mike sent me a nice note. Last time I knew a couple of days in advance but not this time. It's nice motivation to move forward with collecting the Soberanos and building out the new Signature set I want to make.

I was talking to my wife tonight about the fact that, having built a nearly complete pick set from P-1 to P-104, I'm probably going to take a break soon and slow down a lot - move on to other projects for a while. She looks at me and says, "yeah, but how much more could you want at this point?!?" "Well I could work on building out a set of 2003 traveler's checks, get more into replacement notes, specimen notes, fantasy notes... I could branch out into the fuel ration coupons..." She's looking at me in horror, like I've lost my dang mind. "Okay. Nevermind." "See. You really shouldn't ask me these questions." 😆

They're usually good for a year to my understanding.