I know, they're cents, but that is what the page heading shows. I imagine most of you are aware of this purchase opportunity but it's the first time I have seen it. Buy Rare Copper Pennies Worth Money, Shop Historic U.S. Cents - Money Metals I go to the "Money Metals" site just to see what the current spot prices are, maybe check out the ASEs and the gold eagle costs. Just looking around I clicked on the copper link and saw a copper pennies category. That led to finding out that for only $5.99 I could get 1 pound of cents. By my calculations there are about 146 cents in a pound, so only ¢4.1 a piece! But if you get between 340 and 680 pounds you can get that down to only ¢3.9 - what a deal! At copper spot price shown on the page of $4.68 per pound a pre-82 Lincoln has ¢3.2 worth of copper, so only a premium of about 18%, not bad right? After paying to ship several hundred pounds I could turn around and sell them for, what, $5 - $10 a piece on Ebay? I will be RICH!
You need to add the cost of shipping into your overall costs. Their ad also reads 95% copper Pennies, not Wheat Ear Cents but copper which was used part way through 1982. That’s 32 years of Lincoln Memorial Cents and they are not worth $.04 each. Cents cannot be melted by law so the melt value doesn’t even come into play. My LCS sells Wheat Cents for $.06 and LMC’s at $.03 each if bought by the roll. Not worth the effort or energy to me.
Yeah, was only joking. I have started holding all of the pre 82s waiting for the day (not long from now it seems) when they will stop minting them, then eventually de-monetize them.
I don't think the US Gov't has ever demonetarized any of its currency. So, I doubt it will do it with the cents.
Trade Dollars were demonetized in the 19th century. They were sold for less than a dollar as a result. The Coinage Act of 1965 made them into dollars again.
Weird pricing categories. What does 307-339 or 681-713 pounds cost? I wonder how badly people will lose their shirts with this if cents become legal to melt. You have to factor in transportation (not a lot of bang for the buck with copper) and refining costs if you want to get pure copper out of all those pennies. Scrap copper is currently bought for less than $3/lb by the recyclers.
This is the point of the OP - they are selling common copper cents at 4x face value. in essence this makes them a commodity, and it doesn't really matter if they are demonetized or not, they will sell/trade at the current spot price of copper. Think about it - there were nearly 178 BILLION cents made between 1909 and 1982! That equates to about 579 million tons of copper. How many of these today are in peoples sock drawers? How best to cash them in and even more how to know the zinc cents have not been included?
I agree. Copper cents are not pure copper. I don't see them bringing enough to get past the refining cost.
I think you're off by a factor of 1000. I get 617,835 tons out of 178B cents, times whatever percent copper they are. 178B x 3.11g /28 (g/oz) /16 (oz/lb) /2000 (lbs/ton). As a "commodity" it seems like a lot of hopes and dreams to me. Let's say you could profit $0.01 on each cent after all your costs. In order to make real money, say $10,000, you'd be dealing with almost 7000 pounds of pennies.
That's more yield per ton than you'd get from gold ore. Of course, I don't want to keep tons of gold ore in my house, either.
My mistake @KBBPLL - thanks for the correction. Regardless, they are still being bought and sold based on their copper content and the spot price. Just not sure why anyone would actually buy like that?
