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US or Canadian, I usually throw pennies away. They are more of a hassle than value. Carry them around in your pocket and the will eventually wear a hole through the fabric. Store all your pennies in a jar someplace and in fifteen years you will have a whopping $7 (which will be worth about $1.50 in today's money. I keep quarters, usually only one quarter and dimes, but I rarely have dimes. Nickles and pennies, I toss, or give away. Most stores have a take a penny leave a penny tray on the counter. Nickles go in those too.
Frankly I think they should figure out a way to round everything up and just take the pennies and nickles for taxes. No one will care and they could probably make enough to fix the roads or buy some more missles to shoot at dictators who use gas on people.
They'd just round the price up or down when paying cash, the tax would be too complicated to collect that way. That's what happened to Canadian pennies - we stopped making and using them years ago, we just round up or down. Nickels will probably be next.
How often do you find neat stuff? I've never done roll searches, the few times I asked about $.50 pieces they always just had mint rolls. The last time I found silver in the wild was a '64 quarter at a Taco Bell about ten years ago.
Quite frequently. In fact I've found a lot of silver in the wild.
Right after the 08-09 crash, I really found a LOT of good stuff roll-searching. Seems like everyone dug into their piggy banks and started turning in coins for cash. In $20, I could find 20-30 wheat cents and usually 1-2 Indian heads.
Searching the nickels, dimes and quarters would give me 1-2 out of a box or so. Not good...but still felt good to find a 1942 quarter in a roll next to modern stuff.
Out in the wild, I've found mostly dimes, and mostly 1964's. My most numerous find was about 10 years ago when I stopped at Dunk to get a coffee and paid with a $5. I got back 3 silver quarters. I immediately pulled out a $10 and asked for change in quarters and got another 5 our of that roll..most'y 1940's dated quarters.
About 2 years ago, I was in Houston for vacation and got a badly worn 1909-O quarter in change.
Roll searching has dried up these last few years. I might get 3-5 wheats per $20 now. Seems at least in my area, nobody has reason to go digging through old coin jars anymore.
I have a friend who buys and sells coins for a living. Every now and then the mint makes an error and modern coins get distributed that are pretty valuable. He came to visit (and use our house as a base of operations) one time when a shipment of mis-minted coins was released in our area. He went from bank to bank buying, searching and then returning rolls. He said he made $20,000 over the weekend plus a day on each side. He somehow knew which banks were least likely to have already been searched (I think it was mostly credit unions and small local banks). He had to work hard, driving from bank to bank all day collecting rolls and then searching them and re-rolling them at night and on Sunday. We helped him search rolls one evening, it was kind of fun. We did not find anything, but he bought us dinner for our effort. Some banks would not allow him to turning rolls in exchange for other rolls, so he woudl have to go to one bank, turn them in for paper money, then use the paper money to buy rolls at another bank. Some of the small banks and credit unions would only sell rolls to account holders, so it helped him that we had accounts at five banks. Seems like a lot of fast money, but it only happens once in a while and sometimes you spend four days or more working your tail off and find nothing. He has other deals to make money on coins though. I think he does reasonably well with it.
I have a friend who buys and sells coins for a living.
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If you know what you are looking for, you can definitely find some of the modern errors people are selling for good money these days.
I remember when the Wisconsin quarters came out, there was a mint error that gave it a false "extra leaf". I happened to get an entire roll of these brand spanking new. Since I don't collect moderns, I offloaded it for a healthy profit.
Amazing what people pay for a coin. With that said, my wife thinks I'm nuts if I pay more than face value for a coin.
If you know what you are looking for, you can definitely find some of the modern errors people are selling for good money these days.
I remember when the Wisconsin quarters came out, there was a mint error that gave it a false "extra leaf". I happened to get an entire roll of these brand spanking new. Since I don't collect moderns, I offloaded it for a healthy profit.
Amazing what people pay for a coin. With that said, my wife thinks I'm nuts if I pay more than face value for a coin.
With the demise of silver coinage and wheat cents, the era of easy circulation finds came to a close, and collector attention was redirected toward finding errors among the common coins circulating, as well as cherrypicking higher-grade coins from what's available.
Regarding collecting coins, my friend Polly says, "Why would someone pay more money to get less money?"
How many pennies are we talking about? My general rule for pennies is i toss em as they are worthless and just end up as useless pocket or jar fillers.
No NOT the Canadian penny! Do you know how hard it is to obtain them nowadays? Treasure that Maple Leaf coin because they're not made anymore. As for American pennies, well those can be tossed aside because the U.S. Mint still makes billions of them every year.
I throw regular pennies on the ground.. they should have stopped minting them 10-20 years ago.. so naturally I'd throw their canadian counterparts on the ground.
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