A very rare dime just sold for $506,250. According to GreatCollections president Ian Russell, it fetched this eye-popping price in an online auction on October 27. The dime itself is now worth about five million times its original value of 10 cents.
The coin was made in 1975 by the US Mint in San Francisco, California shows President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and is one of only two known coins that exists without a distinctive “S” mark. This marking indicates that it was struck at the San Francisco Mint.
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It is easy to tell where in the United States a coin was minted. There is a small capital letter on the heads side of the coin. It will either have a D for Denver, P for Philadelphia, S for San Francisco, or W for West Point.
In 1975, the mint made over 2.8 million special uncirculated “proof” sets of six coins that were sold for $7. Over the years, collections discovered that two of the dimes were missing this mint marking.
In 2019, the only other known example of one of these “no S” proof dimes from 1975 sold at an auction for $456,000. It was sold again months later to a private collector.
The dime was sold by three anonymous sisters in Ohio who inherited the dime when their brother passed away. He had kept it stored in a bank vault for over 40 years. According to the Associated Press, the sisters told Russel that he and their mother bought the first error coin 1978 for $18,200–about $90,000 today. Their parents viewed the rare coin as a financial safety net.
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While there are possibly more examples of this rare type of dime, they would only be found in the 1975 proof sets and not rustling around in pocket change, according to Russell.