Good afternoon everyone, I hope your week is going well. Since we are now in December, I wanted to review how I did this year in terms of bank account bonuses, credit card annual fees, yearly predictions, and coin reselling with PFS Buyers Club (my referral link). I will write separate blog posts about those first 3 topics later this month, but for today, I wanted to share how I did with coin reselling this year with PFS. This was my best year ever with PFS and I was able to participate in 10 different deals. Long story short, I had $15,128.55 in credit card spend and made $1,246.45 profit (8% return) in 2021.
I created the above table by looking through my US Mint orders and PFS orders to calculate how much I spent and how much I made on each deal. I did 10 orders with the US Mint for a total of $15,128.55. This was great for meeting minimum spending requirements and reaching high spend thresholds. The US Mint only charges your card when your order ships, which can cause issues since 5 of the deals were shipped 2-5 months after I made my order. This can make it tricky for meeting minimum spending requirements, but works out well if you have high spend thresholds to meet by the end of the year.
You will also note that the profit per deal ranged from $30 to $200 and profit percentages ranged from 1% to 56%. I am not an expert on coins by any means, but you don’t need to be to buy and resell to PFS. I’m sure there are certain deals where you can sell the coin to a local coin collector or on eBay for more than what PFS offered, but the process takes more time and there are more risks involved. As a cautionary tale, I wrote Warning: Don’t Try to Beat PFS Buyers Club’s Price in 2018 when I failed miserably to sell a coin on eBay. After that mistake, I decided to always sell to PFS to make my life a little easier. Even though there are a few other coin buying groups out there, I have only ever worked with PFS and never had an issue with PFS, so I plan on sticking with them. If you are new to coin reselling, please use my PFS referral link to join. You will then receive an email the next time PFS has a deal (expect 5-10 deals in 2022).
If you did coin reselling this year, I would love to hear how you did and which coin buying groups you used. If you have any questions about PFS or US Mint coins, please leave a comment below. Have a great day everyone!
Yeah the simplicity sure is hard to beat. Just having a guaranteed sale is such a nice thing. Doing 3 mint orders to get the free budget shipping the rest of the year is kind of a nice little bonus too.
I did have to call in twice to get orders released so it was best to call in a few minutes before 8am EST when they officially open. I got into the queue at 7:52 am and I was talking to an agent at 8:02. The day before I tried to call in and it was a 1 or 2 hour wait.
I do feel like this year was an anomaly though since my previous PFS years were < 5 orders IIRC.
I'm always concerned the card I'm using is going to end up coding it as a Cash Advance like Amex now does.
Hi Danny, thanks for sharing how you did this year with PFS. I don’t think the free budget shipping worked for me since I had to pay for shipping for most of my orders. I think you are right about the number of deals this year was extremely high, compared to past years. I am hopefully we see 5-10 deals in 2022. I normally use my Citi Double Cash or Citi AT&T Access More CC for US Mint orders and they do not get flagged as a cash advance.
Yeah I used my Citi DC card too. Did you get 3x for the Citi Access More card? If so, I might try that next time. I then converted those into AA miles later on.
That’s strange that you didn’t get the free shipping. I got the free shipping after that July 20 order. I received an email about the “Welcome to our Loyalty Program”. Interestingly, at that point, those two May orders hadn’t shipped out yet, but it still counted them as the 3 purchases.
I don’t think I earned 3x on my Citi AT&T Access More since the charges did not post as online purchases. I did it to meet the $10K yearly spend to get 10,000 bonus TYPs. I checked my last few orders and I paid the $4.95 shipping on each one.
Grant- you can call Mint now and they will refund your credit card for all shipping, aside from your 1st three orders. That is, if you opted in to their emails.
Hi Meg, thanks for the tip! I will call the US Mint and see if they can refund me for the shipping charges for the purchases after my first 3 orders.
Update: I called the US Mint and the rep said I wasn’t enrolled in the US Mint Loyalty Program (https://catalog.usmint.gov/customer-service/loyalty-program.html) because I didn’t have promotional emails turned on. I asked if I could be credited back for the shipping I paid after my third order, but the only thing the rep offers was a 1 time $4.95 appeasement (not sure what exactly that is).
I finally did my first PFS deal this year and had a good experience. I did get a bit of buyer’s remorse after I had committed to them and saw some other buyer’s clubs with better deals. Still I decided to stick with them since I had already committed and plus they are the OG so figured it was fine for my first one.
I think next time I might try to match another price but still use PFS. As I understand it they will / may match a price if you ask them before you officially commit
Hi Dan, I’m glad your first PFS deal went well. It always seems like PFS is the first to come out with a deal and price, then all the other buyer clubs come out with slightly higher prices. I have never tried to price match PFS, that just seems kind of tacky, in my opinion. I am happy with the price and they make the process so easy.
I had good luck selling to Pinehurst this year. They do not provide shipping labels free of charge, but they pay so much more it doesn’t really matter if you have to pay for fedex 2day. I would say they are more transparent and have a B&M storefront, unlike PFS.
Hi Tom, thanks for sharing your experience selling coins to Pinehurst. I’m in CA and it looks like Pinehurst is in NC, so shipping might be lot if I used FedEx 2 day shipping. Just curious, how many deals did you do with Pinehurst this year?
Wish me luck. I just agreed to do sell my first set of coins to Pinehurst. I had meant to do PFS for both Morgan deals but I realized today I only opted into one deal. But fortunately, it looks like Pinehurst is offering a little bit more so I guess it works out. Even paying for my own label should be at least double of what PFS would offer me. If you want to save on shipping, use Shippo. I think they are grouping all of our orders together to get a big bulk discount from UPS, USPS, Fed Ex and others. I’ve noticed the prices are way cheaper than what I get from UPS even with my 10% discount.
Hi Danny, good luck with your Pinehurst sale, I’ve never used them but I’ve heard their name a few times. I use PirateShip for my USPS and UPS shipping since they have really good rates. Let me know how it goes after you’ve been paid by Pinehurst.
Does PFS do gift card reselling as well?
Hi HoKo, no, they are just into coins. Are you looking for a gift card reseller?
I’m going to check out Pinehurst. Thanks for the tip, Tom.
It’s always nice to have more options. After that whole Tulving blowup years ago, I’m always a little concerned dealing with coin shops. If any of you want an interesting read, check out the Tulving bankruptcy case. The TLDR is that they were one of the largest most established coin buyers and sellers and they started speculating on the price of gold and got wiped out during a big drop and all the people who sent them coins during those last months/year didn’t get paid. It looks like most ppl received about 0.18% of what they were owed.
http://about.ag/tulving.htm
I was lucky that I sold to Tulving many times, but I didn’t sell any more to them a year and a half before their problems started. And I sold before the clawback period(I believe 1 year) where they have the right to ask for the money back.
But for these types of new releases, I’d like to think the risks are lower. Thankfully most of the deals are less than $1000 so it’s lesser amount of total loss if a deal goes south. If anything, I’d like to think that PFS is safer in that regard since it appears they are buying for a group(s) so they shouldn’t be holding any inventory.
But moving forward, I’d expect competition to become more fierce. We’re probably exiting the golden period where it was easy to get the deals, the profits were small and reliable and we’re going to start seeing bigger commissions and a less likelihood of getting a deal since there are so many people trying for them.
Hi Danny, thanks for the background info and link about Tulving. I had never heard of Tulving before.
I have used PFS a couple of times and have never had a problem. They are very organized and straightforward. My problem is that I feel like I have a moral conundrum every time I consider them. I feel like ticket scalpers jack the price up on tickets in a way that is really detrimental for everyday buyers, so I ask myself if this is the same thing.
On the other hand, I feel like the US Mint is sort of a rep off in and of itself and why shouldn’t I make some money.
How do you people feel about this?
That’s a tough one. I think as long as you do not resell or price gouge essential items, like gas and medicine, the unessential / luxury goods are fair game. Also, every time you buy an item from a retailer, they mark up the price that they bought the item, so you can’t avoid this in life.
Grant, do you have a contact over at PFS? Their domain is redirecting to pfsbuyerclub.com (note the missing “s”) which has a different logo as well. They also sent out spam (copy of email from earlier this year). Seems they were either hacked or sold out.
I received an email from PFS yesterday. Email came from support@pfsbuyerclub.com with the subject line “New Enrollment Opportunity” that started like this:
“The US Mint has opened Enrollment offerings for five different 2023 Morgan and Peace releases.
To be clear:
1. These are for Morgan and Peace coins that are going on sale in 2023.
2. The Enrollment is currently open. You can do this today.”
I was able to sign into the new website with my login and see all my previous emails. I think they changed their domain and updated the logo. I don’t see anything to be worried about.
I received that email as well. The real PFS sent the same email in July with slight differences (subject line being one of them). There was no reason for them to do so again when no details have changed about the enrollment or schedule. I think logging into their website is a mistake when we don’t know if they have been compromised or not. Everything about this is kinda sus.
I looked on whois.com and both registrations look similar to me:
https://www.whois.com/whois/pfsbuyersclub.com
https://www.whois.com/whois/pfsbuyerclub.com
I don’t know why they changed the URL.