Owner Comments:
Mintage: 40,754
This was the first coin purchased for this set after a very long period with no progress being made on it. I didn't realize it at the time, but I bought it almost 7 years to the day after I bought what had previously been the last coin added to the set. The 1876 was bought on 6/16/2009 and this coin followed in the first couple of weeks of June 2016.
I never forgot about it, but grad school started and, suddenly, I didn't have much time or money for coins.
I graduated with my doctorate in Aug 2015. I got married in Jan 2016 and started a new job. My son was born in March of 2016. It was a lot of crazy and rapid change, but, during all of this, I found that I had a little bit of money to start spending on silver, gold and coins again.
In June 2016 this coin came up for sale from a dealer based out of Florida. They listed it with a "Buy it Now" that was a little higher than I liked but not too much higher and I saw some potential. I looked up their contact info and contacted the store directly, off-eBay to see if they'd be willing to take a little less for it and they were. I think I ended up paying about $375 for it.
Part of my reluctance to pay more for it and the need to haggle came from the fact that the coin was only MS64. This is the only coin in the set to date that's graded below an MS65. But that doesn't mean I wasn't thrilled at the prospect of getting it.
I went for it because it was at the time the only example of this date that I've ever seen come up for sale and I wanted to fill an important slot in this set (since that time I've seen one other, ungraded example come up for sale). This coin was the second lowest mintage date in the series. It wasn't the rarest - the 1888 - but it was rare, I knew it, and getting one for my set was going to be a major step forward. Before getting this coin I think I'd mostly thought I'd be doing good to get all of the common dates in solid grades and that I'd probably have to just accept not being able to find coins from the 1880s - it was a pretty reasonable expectation given that the NGC populations for most of these coins, in all grades, is under 50. For context, there are more 1875-dated coins graded by NGC in MS67 than there are graded by NGC in all grades for some of these dates.
Getting this was a rush, a charge. After 6 or 7 years without buying anything for this set I was re-energized. Where I'd almost given up hope long ago of ever finishing this set I now had a lot of hope that it could be done with time and patience. I added searches like "NGC Netherlands 10" to my saved searches on eBay with email notifications turned on, hoping to know as soon as possible if another of the key dates in the 1880s came up for sale!
Alas, 3 moths later I was laid off from my job. Early hopes of landing something soon turned into a year without a job, and buying gold coins during that long period was not an option. But there were many times when I looked at those emails and saved searches, added items to my watch list and hoped. My wife and I talked about getting a coin for this set after I landed a job as a kind of celebration of lean times ending. It was something I looked forward to for a long time.
Last Rev: 09/2019