Posted on 02/06/2011 4:25:44 PM PST by blam
Figures, I’ve been out of there for a while. The mines are huge and some knew the industry was set to explode. Unfortunately I was poor and worried more about a roof. :^)
I LOVE this site!
Interesting, guess I’d better hunt for it.
Yup. Silver = $500/oz before I die of natural causes.
And probably before the 2012 elections.
;-)
For $500, you can buy a machine that sorts through mountains of pennies, separating those pre-’82 ones worth 3 cents from the the rest of the crap:
For the time it would take me to examine every nickle and penny in my giant jar to find any real copper or nickel ones, I could go out and shovel two driveways and come out ahead...........
Pennies, if you have a good supply (and way to sell back the new ones) can be sorted as I note in post 127.
Not true, nickels from sometime in 1942-1945 had 35% silver. The so-called "war nickels" are worth about $1.70 right now. Good luck finding one in change - probably 99.9999% of them have been removed from circulation.
However, despite the fact that there were SOME part-silver nickels produced, that's not what the article is about. It is about the common, ordinary nickel, the melt value of which is now about 7.3 cents. Unlike every other coin out there, ALL nickels in circulation are currently worth more as metal than as currency. This is equivalent to getting rolls of dimes, quarters or halves in late 1964, when ALL of them previously made were 90% silver. The article is saying to start collecting them NOW, since the composition is likely to change in the not-so-distant future to something worth considerably less, in the same way that all other coins have in the past.
“There are 146 copper pennies to a pound. Copper is about $4.50 a pound. Therefore each copper penny is worth about 3 cents.”
As others have pointed out, the pennies that are worth this much as metal are those made before the changed composition that started in mid-1982. I don’t even bother with the 1982 pennies, as it isn’t worth it to sort them.
My experience is that somewhere around 14%-15% of all pennies are pre-1982. I have probably $100 worth, and counting. I’ll get $20 of pennies every couple of weeks to sort through. No, I won’t retire on that (nor on hoarding nickels), but every little bit helps. Someday we will go back to a system or real money, where the metal content of a “copper” is actually worth something, the way it used to be (of course, the “coppers” from before 1856 were considerably larger than since then - 5.44 grams of pure copper, vs. 3.11 grams of 95% copper in the pre-’82 Lincoln cents).
FYI, the best way to find the current melt value of current-circulation base-metal coins is to use the following site: http://www.coinflation.com/coins/basemetal_coin_calculator.html
For silver coins, go to http://www.coinflation.com/coins/silver_coin_calculator.html
Same for me, at least recently - I found a couple of Indians back in the early '70s when I first started collecting, but that's it. I hope to someday find another Indian Head, or some valuable Lincoln, but the vast, vast majority of those are gone. I do get a Wheatie about every 10 rolls or so, meaning that the $20 worth that I get every couple of weeks nets me 4 or so. Those get saved separately, same as the pre-1960 nickels - because they generally have a greater collector's value...which I hope to realize, someday.
“Ok, I’ve worked the math out based on the latest spot prices for copper and nickel and the US Mint’s formulation for nickels at 25% nickel and 75% copper. I cleaned out my change drawer and weighed 35 nickels on a kitchen scale. The results:
35 nickels weighed 6.1 oz or 0.0109 lb
Scrap Copper at $4.5666 per lb
Scrap nickel at $12.7896 per lb
$4.5666 * 0.0109 * 75% = 3.73 cents copper
$12.7896 * 0.0109 * 25% = 3.49 cents nickel
= about 7.2 cents total per coin”
Its easier to use a website dedicated to just this purpose: http://www.coinflation.com/coins/basemetal_coin_calculator.html
Why would you have to examine a Nickel? All Nickels are 75% copper, 25% Nickel (with the exception of the war nickel which are worth more).
Nickels are nickels (for the time being) go buy a few rolls. It’s 43% profit on metal weight on every thing you buy.
I would give you cash for all your nickels so I could roll them up.
Happy shoveling.
It’s a great way to have instant “down side protection”.
Heck it’s infinite down side protection; you can’t lose anything, but a little bit of your time, and some used up space in your closet or basement. You still have the face value to fall back on if everything stabilizes.
Well, at least collecting nickels is cheaper than collecting pre-1965 silver coins.
Well, at least collecting nickels is cheaper than collecting pre-1965 silver coins.
gee, I feel so smart now for buying $50 worth of pennies back in 1981....haven’t got a clue why I did it...
gee, I feel so smart now for buying $50 worth of pennies back in 1981....haven’t got a clue why I did it...
Now 1981 pennies are triple face value, and all nickles 40% above face value, which makes either a winning (not waiting) purchase NOW.
BFLR
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.