How should you be caring for and protecting your coin collection? There's three main components to this equation which are handling coins, cleaning coins, and the storage of your coins. Let's look at each one of these a little more in depth.
Handling your coins:
When you're handling coins you pretty much want to grip the coin around it's edge with your thumb and forefinger. Best practice would be to wear some sort of glove, preferably a cotton glove. Coins are dirty and our hands can be dirty and oily and we can transfer that to a coin. We even recommend handling graded coin slabs on the edges with clean or gloved hands when possible.
Cleaning Coins:
The best answer here is just don't do it. Improperly cleaned coins is one of if not the type reason that valuable coins become damaged and at times not gradable. We really don't want to see you ruin a very valuable coin to just make it look a little better.
Storing your collection:
Ideally you want to store your collection in a cool and dry location. Humidity changes, salty air, and temperature extremes can effect the surface of coins over time. It is best to store your coins in some sort of holder or album to limit their exposure to harmful elements.
For slabbed and graded coins we recommend storing them in either a PCGS or NGC storage box. When you send coins off for grading boxes are usually returned with your coins or you can find them for sale at various places.
To securely store your collection, albums and such we recommend either a personal home safe or even a safety deposit box. In general it is best to keep your collection stored in various places instead of just one place so it's harder to steal everything, if the worst case were to happen. This does make it difficult to show off your collection so you have to make a personal decision on which method is best for you. Our recommendation is at minimum multiple locked and secure locations in your home. Preferably in a locked safe, located in a closet that can be locked as well.
This was just the very basics of caring for your collection. Stay tuned to the Collectible Craze University and The Collectible Craze as we plan to dive deeper into this topic. We might even show you how we store our personal collections here.