Welcome to the end of the week and another edition of Happy Hour! Just sit back, relax, and enjoy your end of the week roundup of all things interesting in the land of money.
Buried Treasure
Everyone has a story about finding money on the ground. For most of us, I’d bet it was no more than lose change, or if lucky, a few bucks. That’s nothing compared to what a California couple found. It was 1,400 gold coins worth $10,000,000! Talk about stumbling onto a fortune.
Lucky for them, the value of the coins has everything to do with quality and rarity and not denomination.
Anyone who’s collected anything like coins, stamps, or even baseball cards, knows there’s a grading scale involved. You get descriptions like uncirculated, proof, mint, near mint, fine, good, and poor. A collector hopes for the best grade possible because there is a big difference in value between the highest grade and the second tier. Once you get toward the middle grades the value drops fast.
For this couple, the coin quality falls into the higher grades and the rarity pushes the value even higher. Any avid collectors out there will be able to buy the coins through Amazon soon.
Free Course
Another free course popped up on Coursera – The Beginner’s Guide to Irrational Behavior. It begins March 11th. The course covers the psychology behind our financial decisions, how some of those decisions aren’t as rational as we believe, and how to improve the process. Take a look if you have any interest in behavioral economics.