Hoarding Nickels: Why Your Pocket Change Might Be Worth More Than You Think

While conventional personal finance wisdom of solomon broadly discourages hiding your savings under your bed, there ’ s one way that doing so might be a sound scheme .
Although it ’ s possible to make money by hoarding pennies or by searching rolls of collect pouch change for coins with high argent and copper message, these methods are boring and hard to scale .
It ’ mho easy to search through one roll of quarters in search of a pre-1965 mint containing valuable silver, but I ’ ve found that doing so with all 50 rolls in a standard bank box can take considerable time.

Plus, after you search through the coins, you must re-roll and return them to the bank, which requires extra work .
There must be an easier manner, I thought .
And indeed there is : Buy nickels .

The Easier Way to Earn Money With Coins

Whenever you have money to put in salvage, buy nickels by the box ( $ 100 each at a bank ) and merely put the boxes in your basement, in your water closet or under your bed .
Consider american nickels as assets. Their denomination is therefore humble, and their system of weights so relatively great, that they are broadly not worth a thief ’ south campaign. If your house burned gloomy, they would survive the fire, unlike newspaper money. even if they were melted into a batch of slag, they could still be deserving every dollar that you paid for them — or even more .

The True Value of Nickels 

The common american nickel is made from an admixture of two base metals, nickel ( 25 % ) and copper ( 75 % ), known as cupro-nickel. Cupro-nickel is valuable for industrial processes such as shipbuilding, as are both nickel and copper individually, and both metals are listed on commodity market exchanges .
The value of its materials means that each nickel has both a “ side respect ” ( $ 0.05 ) and a “ dissolve value ” ( $ 0.03799296 on June 26, 2019, though this fluctuates ) .
The melt value of a $ 100 box of nickels from 1946-2014 was $ 75.86 on June 26, 2019. This means that every corner of nickels costs the U.S. Mint $ 75.86 in metals alone. Once the Mint applies stamps and cuts the metal into coins, it besides gives people the correct to redeem that metallic for the same monetary value at which it was sold : $ 100.00 .
Two values of coins ( front and thaw ) provide a unique advantage in investments : a guarantee that you will not lose any money. With $ 100 in nickels, there is no hazard of losing money : You will constantly be able to redeem your $ 100 box of nickels for $ 100 .

Why You Might Want to Save Your Nickels

This advantage is the reason many people have started hoarding their nickels : They ’ ra bet on future increases in the value of cupro-nickel .
fair as the U.S. Mint changed the penny ’ s musical composition from chiefly expensive copper to chiefly much-cheaper zinc in 1982, any changes to the nickel ’ s composition will mean that modern coins will slowly phase out the existing inventory of cupro-nickel coins. finally, today ’ s cupro-nickel nickels could be a rarity sought out by gem hunters.

The Downside of Investing in Nickels

Of path, as with all investments, there are some downsides. In this lawsuit, the main one is opportunity cost, the effective loss you face as a consequence of not having invested your $ 100 in an opportunity that would have provided a greater level of fiscal emergence ( like a certificate of situate or an index fund ) .
opportunity cost is a risk in any investment scheme, as there ’ mho always the possibility that you could have chosen a more profitable investment — that ’ s region of the game .
If inflation continues to increase and metal prices fall, the $ 100 face value of your nickels will have less purchasing baron as the years go by .
Another drawback to collecting nickels is their size and weight. A standard $ 100 box weighs 10 kilogram ( each nickel weighs 5g ) and is about the size of a large brick. If you ’ re collecting a large count, they ’ ll quickly start to take up space in your family .
finally, there ’ s the minor detail that legislation makes it illegal to melt down U.S. coins in the United States or to export more than $ 100 worth of coins .

Will You Become a Nickel Hoarder?

Despite the drawbacks, many people are building their own stockpiles of nickels, and there are no laws against collecting coins and then selling or trading them with other collectors .
For more information and promote discussion, you may want to explore the advice offered on forums like Realcent.org .
Owen Ferguson is a contributor to The Penny Hoarder.
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