Nickel Collecting?

Since some people talked about copper cents, let me share some information.

I am in Pennsylvania and I saw that the chance of getting a copper cent in change has dropped pretty fast. You're lucky to get one copper per every 25.
It's all new 2012 Zinc cents you just get.

So is the government pulling coppers out too like collectors? Why would the percentage just take a sharp drop?

Today I picked up an order of cents and nickels from my banks. Quarterly I receive $400 in cents and $200 in nickels. Plan to go though them someday. A copper cent has a larger return on melt value than a nickel,but nickels might yield silver War Nickels too and I will look for 2009 dates. Demand from China for copper is anticipated to drive prices higher over the next few decades, which is my holding window. A nickel yields nickel and copper, while a cent yields copper and nearly worthless zinc. The way I see it is even silver dimes and quarters were once speculated as not being worth saving. And now they can be 20-40 times face value depending on silver's price. It took 40-50 years though. I don't think nickels or cents will meet this in my lifetime, but even 5-10x would be nice.

Certainly holding $1 in nickels or copper cents is smarter than holding a paper dollar. And I do think eventually the government will mass harvest the copper cents from circulation. I am aware of large private operations already doing this, and a friend of mine has a goal of $100,000 in copper cents as a means to diversify his holdings (and not hold paper dollars).

That's my Two Cents!

i do as well

Let's see... Consider $35k in cents. That's 1,400 $25 boxes of cents. I hope your friend has a sprawling basement:

One $25 box of cents is a bit over .75 cubic feet. so that's ~1,050 CF or almost 40 cubic yards of cents at 25,200 pounds.

Here's visually what 40CY looks like:




This comes to mind when I think about that many coins in a basement...

Rather than save U.S. Nickels that are only 25% nickel, it makes more sense to me to save foreign nickel content coins that are 99.9% pure nickel (like the Canadian Nickels pre-1982, French Francs, etc.). Although, I too save my pre-1982 pennys and my nickels, I just don't think it would be worth it to buy in bulk...

I run a snack fund at work and read a bit on hoarding nickels a while back. I can't make it to a coin shop, so I just started pulling all of the nickels and setting them aside as some form of coin collecting. I've bought each one in my collection from the snack fund for a nickel each. Now for my entire collection I am missing 39 coins to complete the collection. I've even pulled three of the silvers from my snack fund. And I have a big enough box of nickels at home to cash them in and buy my remaining coins (in circulated condition) on ebay. So yeah, I've fallen in love with the Jeffersons and have been hoarding them for about 8 months now.

Copper takes huge constant heat to get it to melt. Bronze even hotter.