Posted on 01/19/2015 8:14:45 PM PST by Citizen Zed
Save every penny you encounter over more than 60 years, and you could end up with 500 pounds' worth. But that lifetime of saving may be worth more in bragging rights than in financial gain.
A Texas man has deposited his 81,600-penny collection, wowing bankers and earning him a spot in the news—though the coins themselves were worth just $816. Ira Keys, 81, of Slaton says he started saving in 1952 on his father's advice, KCBD reports. "He says, 'Whatever you do, son, save your money,'" Keys says. "I didn't have a lot of money, so I saved pennies and I just kept saving them."
(Excerpt) Read more at kvue.com ...
“I would imagine there is at least 100 pounds of loose change ... I keep telling myself: “hey if I go broke, this is cigarette money for a few weeks”.”
Clearly you don’t live in New York City!
Nope, though the cigarette prices are probably nearly as high where I live.
I think I’ve probably got a good bit of cash though, since I’ve got more than just pennies saved up. I’ve raided them for quarters before and easily pulled 10 dollars worth out of one bag.
Wow, I looked him up. He made over 13,000 from them, face value.
Now, if he had been enterprising, he could have kept them, set up a display in his gas station, and charged everyone 10 cents to see the “World’s Largest Penny Collection”.
I was just kidding (kinda) with cigs @ $12+ per pack in NYC. I’m pretty sure the escalation started with the Clintons and their anti-smoking jihad. I seem to recall you could get a pack for $3 before they showed up. (or $1+/pack here in VA)
I remember when I was a teenager, and we went on a family trip to the Southeast. Cigarettes were still only around $2.50 a pack then by me, but when we got to Raleigh, North Carolina, I was in heaven. $1.00 a pack for all the “major” brands, and .50 a pack for some “off” brands.
I thought I’d only had enough cash for a pack, and ended up with 3 packs for the rest of the trip. I think it was just kismet that Raleigh happened to be the town I was able to sneak off from the folks long enough to run to the gas station to buy some. I was a bit worried about getting “carded” still, but the old man behind the counter couldn’t have cared less. I imagine that 12 year olds are probably regular customers down there :)
“I’ll probably get some crap for this but I just toss my pennies in the trash or out on the street when I get them as change.”
There’s an awesome book titled, “The Millionaire Next Door.”
The authors interviewed (as I recall) about a 1,000 millionaires looking for common traits. One was that they always picked up pennies. The reason wasn’t that pennies had value, but that picking them up represented a mental attitude of not leaving money lying around. I’ve been buying repossessed houses. I have a total of four including the one I’m living in. Two of them and several others I went into to inspect for purchase were scattered with coins, mostly pennies. But in the one I’m living in, the former owner left about $20 in coins inside and I found another couple of dollars in the sand driveway exposed by the rains over the years.
Other traits included, the average car was bought used and was now 10 years old. They owned outright modest homes in modest middle class neighborhoods. They generally owned their own small business. (I can’t recall the others off hand.)
But, because of that all-important attitude, I always pick up pennies.
When I was in the AF overseas in 1969, they were 10 cents a pack, $1.00 a carton. We used to get these C-rations sometimes when we had to work during a typhoon. Each meal box had a little 4-pack of cigarettes in them.
A carton of Salems would get you...........
So you’re the one throwing out the pennies I pick up. Thanks!!
Live within your means, and put some money away from every paycheck. Rule Number One of “investing.” Without this, no other money strategy or plan will ever work. None.
Wheat back pennys are always looked for. I still find them once in a while, along with silver quarters and dimes. Once I got a Ben Franklin half in change and almost died
I can’t walk past coins people throw away, they don’t want it, I do. It adds up. I’d empty my pockets in a pan on the dresser each night, when it got full of change, I’d roll it and stash them on top of one of my bookcases. After a few years, I had $800 in rolled coin up there! Nice little stash, not to mention the pile of aces under the blue plastic 100 round box of .44 mag in my ammo drawer...
A penny urned is a penny saved.
Weren’t wheat pennies made from 1909 through 1958, rather than from 1952 - 1958?
You are correct. I was giving dates from the standpoint of his participation rather than from the standpoint of the mint’s production. He began in 1952, when they were only minting wheat pennies.
Yep!
This guy probably tossed about $1500 - $2000 in numismatic curiosity value down the drain.
.
Pretty well describes our “disposal, throwaway” culture.
Some things are dumb no natter the scale, to broadcast it is stupid.
Just doing a mental calculation here and I figure I might toss an average of three or four pennies a day in the penny jar, usually at the Dunkin Donuts when I'm getting my coffee. But let's round up to 5 pennies a day, just for sake of argument.
If I saved 5 cents a day, that would come to $18.25 in saved pennies a year. I guess for some that would be worthwhile but on average, I save triple that amount every single day between my 401k and other savings/investments. Yes, that about $20,000 a year for those who do the math. So adding that $18.25 a year would increase my savings by .000925%.
If I did collect those pennies, think about the time involved to roll them up and take them to the bank. Is it worth $15-20 of my time over the course of a year? I think not. It's actually foolhardy. Sort of like driving to a store 20 miles out of your way to take advantage of a $1 coupon. You burn more gas getting there than what you save.
So this isn't really so much about being wasteful but demonstrating that need that we need to do away with the penny entirely and round everything up to the nearest nickel. Think of all the money and time that would save us all.
OK, no problem.....that makes sense (or should I say, “cents?”)
I remember as a kid finding a number of 1943 steel wheat pennies in my parent’s change; apparently copper was in demand because of the war effort during World War II, and the steel cents made by the mint in 1943 were still in circulation decades later when I used to find them.
A small number of copper blanks were stamped by the mint “1943,” and those pennies, in copper, are extremely rare.
Some crooks in the past used to take 1948 pennies and they scraped off the left side of the “8,” thus making a bogus 1943 copper penny. An authentic 1943 copper cent would be quite a find.
Yep, figure the wheat backed pennies were worth a nickel each, minimum.
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