I went to my bank and I had my dad go out of town to buy some cents and all I'm getting is new ones what's the deal is the thread that I read a couple of weeks ago about removing collectable coins true or am I missing something?
I suspect copper memorial cents have become what wheat cents were when I was young. An obsolete curiosity that still circulates but will disappear in due time.
Look at the mintage numbers as time goes on. That should explain a lot. After 1960 a billion+ minted a year became common. Eventually that turned into 5,6,7 billion a year. 2016 saw 8.5 billion new ones dumped in. Every year the old stuff is getting diluted by another 8+ billion.
Zinc Lincolns have been out for 36 years. Small wonder with the mintages. Too bad, too. A lot of us got started with Lincolns.
I know that pre-1983 Lincoln cents disappear from circulation but what happens to them? Do they actually get melted down, or are they hoarded more?
They get dumped into change jars all over the country and that is where they are sitting yet because people consider them too low a value to be worth fooling with either to roll or in most cases even to lug to a coinstar machine. So when the jar get full it is just pushed aside and they start a new one. If you work the numbers the number of coins that have to be lost, thrown away, of thrown into a change jar that never gets recycled come to less than 4 coins per household per week to consume the ENTIRE annual production of the Mint each year. Or one coin per person per week. How many of you pull just one coin per week out of circulation? Get a roll of new 2018 cents at the bank and put it away, that's your entire quota of coins from the mint for six months. With it needing such a small number of coins being pulled each week I marvel that were have ANY circulating coins at all.
I know of a guy that says he goes thru 50,000 cents every week primarily to pull the copper ones out. I've bought a few hundred pounds of them at face when he needed some quick cash to buy a coin he wanted. He does sell them on craigslist at a premium. I haven't talked with him for a while, but last summer he was sitting on 30 tons of copper cents. That's where a few of them go.
He's losing money. As has been explained many times, in many other threads. Copper price is for Grade A copper, which copper cents are not.
He is not melting them down for the copper, just selling them as they are. Evidently people are willing to pay his price, because he has been doing it for quite a while. I can't think that the profit per hour would be worthwhile, at least not to me, but I can easily see that he is making some money with his method, not losing it.
Good for him. Free enterprise. Capitalism works. As for the people who are hoarding copper to sell in the future, currently you're not allowed to melt them down. It's illegal. For people who think they are going to make a killing because there is 2 cents worth of copper in 1 cent, alloyed copper brings 25% the spot price. Copper will have to go to $6 just to break even. It's never been much higher than $4 and is currently a little under $3. (2.83 ish)
Historic high was $4.31 and I agree, have to hit at least 6 to break even, and te longer you hold waiting for that you lose the money you could have made investing the money, not to mention the loss in value from the declining value of the dollar over time.
