Mint State Better Date Saints

Back by popular demand, is a limited selection of one of our favorite gold coins—the “Better Date” $20 Saint-Gaudens! Designed by famed sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, $20 “Saints” are easily one of the most popular U.S. gold coins due to their stunning design. The “Better Date Saints” we have available today are innumerably more difficult to find than their common date counterparts.

The $20 Saints series contains both readily available dates and extremely rare coins. Mintages and survival rates vary tremendously year to year. In addition, one tiny mintmark can make an incredible difference in value.

For example, in 1927, the Philadelphia Mint issued an enormous number of $20 Saints. Their output was over 2.9 million coins. The same year, the Denver Mint struck 180,000 coins—all but a roll or two were melted. As a result, the 1927 $20 Saint is readily available and sells for $2,100 to $2,300 per coin in Uncirculated. The 1927-D, meanwhile, is a major rarity. One sold for just shy of $2 million in 2014!

The takeaway message is that dates and mintmarks absolutely matter when it comes to $20 Saints.

As a general rule, $20 Saints minted between 1910 and 1923 tend to be scarcer than the 1924 to 1928 Philadelphia issues. Firstly, the mintages are considerably lower. Their output levels were in the hundreds of thousands instead of the millions. Secondly, the later dates were more likely to be sent overseas, and therefore shielded from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1933 Executive Order banning all ownership of gold.

Simply put, these better dates represent the most advantageous way to own $20 Saints. 

The only downside to these underappreciated dates: there aren’t enough of them to go around. We wish we could round up hundreds of these coins, but they’re not easy to find.

 

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