My good wife has gone from supporter of this new hobby of mine to borderline obsessed with it herself (which is a whole other topic for another post/day). Today she spent her lunch hour looking at a map picking out the really small town within driving distance of us that have local community banks (versus national banks, i.e. BAC, etc.). Her purpose? To find one with enough rolls of half dollars to be worth the drive to go pick up and search through. I recently shared with her my theory (which I believe is shared by others here) that you are more likely to find "the good stuff" (at least when searching halves) in rolls from small banks in small towns that would likely only deal with halves when they have been cashed in by older hoarders/collectors. Soooo, today she called a local bank that only has one office and one branch in a small town about 45 minutes away. They have $3000 in halves in their vault!!! I have since called them myself to confirm that as well as to ask that they hold on to them for me. There is no way I can do $3000 all at once, but can get through that fairly quickly once I can search, dump, and repeat. The teller was caught completely off guard when I asked her to keep them there for me and even seemed suspicious after I explained my reasoning to her. So my whole point in putting this up here, what do you guys think? Have I stumbled upon someone's dump bank? Or, have I hit the motherload (so to speak)? I am not naive enough to think they will be anything like half 90%s and 40%s. But, I am thinking that they will either be absolutely no silver at all, or a higher proportion of silver than you would normally see. Am I off base in thinking that? Just curious if you folks that are more experienced than me at this would agree with my thinking or not.
Buy $500 worth, search them, dump the non-keepers, go back buy another $500 and so on. Couple of hours work and it might be worth it. Just my off-the-cuff idea.
Exactly what I am doing. The only real problem with that is my normal dump bank is 45 minutes away and I don't want to "pollute" this bank. So I'm just going to do $500 tommorrow and drive back home to dump. If hit it even remotely big, I'll go back Wednesday to get $1000 and then drive home and dump again, etc. Once I've gone through all of them, I plan on calling back in a week or so just to see if they have any more again...
Well you both clearly have an obsession for be willing to drive just to go to a bank haha , but you never know might be worth a shot! Maybe get some franklins Either way Keep us posted and let us know what you find!!
Sounds to me like your right on the money. (No pun intended!) 50/50 You will get a lot of silver, 50/50 you will get none.
I think your chances are good to get some silver...$3000 is 6 boxes...if this is somebodys dump bank, I think they would have a lot more halves.
If you've got the cash then go buy them. You never know. Someone may have bought some bags of junk silver halves many years ago and then died. Heirs may have cashed them in. I got a whole bag of almost mint condition 40% halves a few months ago. I would not think that you would find a whole bag of older coins. Most non collectors would probably atleast try and take a bag of Franklins to a dealer so they could get ripped off. You might get lucky and get a large quantity of 1964's because to the novice they look like modern half dollars and most people have seen a half a few times in their lives.
