Yesterday, I was about to pick up some loose bags of coins from one of my banks. I was going to getting everything but the quarters as there is usually nothing but foreign coins and game tokens in there. Well I show up and she tells me they didn't have any dimes (despite previously telling me that she did have them). So as a twist of fate, I take 2 bags of quarters, plus all their pennies and nickels. I go through the first bag and find 1 dime 2 game tokens 14 foreign coins (the most valuable was two 10 pence coins, still worth less than a quarter) 1 2008P Oklahoma (I get almost exclusively Denver around here) 1 1941 Quarter I just paid $4.50 for a silver Washington. Well, I break the seal on the second bag and look inside. I see the silver edge on a bunch of coins and figure I just got burned with a ton of foreign coins. Karma was on my side because I pulled out of that bag $46.25 in Silver Washingtons $1.50 in Standing Liberties (all dateless, but two has S marks) $0.25 in silver canadian and a penny. After that bag, all is forgiven for the previous bag. Even better, not a single token or foreign coin in the bag. Awesome.
My wife goes down to the senior center here in town (we're only 30-something, but there's nothing else to do) to play quarter bingo 2 times a week. Just about every time she comes back with a silver quarter. So the trick to finding them is to live in a community where the average age of a person is old enough to actually remember circulating silver coins. All those dressers that haven't moved in 50 years provide lots of silver quarters.
