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RE: Silver of the Day #5 - Penny For Your Thoughts
So do people buy the pennies to melt for the copper and then sell that? And then tell me why you are hanging on to them? This is all new to me:) I love the Indian penny mixed in there too. Does the US still use pennies? We got rid of ours in Canada a couple of years ago I think. And lastly, what's a wheat penny?
My questions might make another post for you :)
I think that some people might. Those old pennies are only 95% copper, so the Canadian ones are better if you want copper for weight. Canadian ones are 98% copper. I'm hanging onto them because I think they look cool.
I don't actually hang with those people, but I'd like to. You can pour anything. You can a paperweight of whatever, you can make it. :)
Yes, the US still uses pennies, but it's more expensive to make them than they're actually worth. I think the last I heard, it was like $0.03 to make one penny.
I thought y'all still had pennies in Canada. They just haven't made new ones since 2012. They're still legal tender though, so I don't think you can melt them down.
A wheat penny is an older version of the penny. It's a different design. If you look on the back, it has sheaves of wheat. I probably could do another post on it. Maybe I'll wait a while before that one though so people forget I've been posting on pennies already. ;)
Seems crazy that a coin worth 0.01 actually costs 0.03 to make. I think that was the issue with us too, so they were scrapped. Actually Brian's brother had buckets of them and he used to work at GM, so he took them there and melted them down. Not legal tender anymore ;)
That's cool about the wheat penny; I had no idea. And I get "hanging on to them because they look cool" too. That's what it's all about. You love it, so keep it.
Yeah, you'd hope that if you were going to put money into making something that it would be worth more than the cost... especially when the thing that you're making is legal tender. Whatever.
I imagine that within a few years we'll see the same thing happen in the USA. There's not much reason in a physical location to hand out pennies. I think a smart business could eliminate them already and just post a sign that says something like, "All transactions will be rounded up to the nearest nickel and the difference will be donated to ________ charity." Then every transaction, cash, check, credit card, or cryptocurrency will be rounded to a nickel and charity will be supported. It might not be the best solution, but it seems like it could work. They'd probably get a lot of positive PR from it.
Yes, once they're not legal tender, then they can be melted. I don't like the idea of melting the wheat ones though, so I'll find something else. There aren't a lot of things that I want to hang onto, so I figure I should be ok.