Is It Worthwhile To Hoard Copper Pennies?

Just to clarify, at today's copper spot price of $9,145.25 per ton, $5.00 of copper cents would translate to roughly $13.46 in melt value, after taking into account 95% copper content and wear over the years. That's a 169% profit, if you can get spot.

ebay is notorious for fees and other considerations. From a buyer's point of view, they also have to pay for shipping and tax. From a seller's point of view, they have to pay a hefty ebay fee. So it's very hard to get full melt value on ebay after all those deductions. Then again, there are people on ebay who will pay more than melt value, as in the case of copper bullion, which in my opinion is a lot less cost effective.

In terms of melting it down, personally, I'm not planning to do that. However, for those enterprising enough to try, economics aside, refined copper is very fungible, meaning that it's near impossible to tell one bar from the next, just like silver and gold. I'm definitely not advocating for it, but the law in its current form seems difficult to enforce in real life, due to the fungibility of pure copper (and other commodity metals). This is also the reason why Swiss banks are able to get away with buying conflict gold and "laundering" them clean in their vaults.

I agree more with CarrsCoins that maybe the coins themselves will be worth more in the future, which is also what I'm hoping for. The only uncertain element is the time horizon, i.e. will I live long enough to see it.

Cheers!

"Getting spot" is always tricky for alloyed base metals, because a large proportion of your "profits" is eaten up in refining costs. Nobody will pay you $9145/ton for contaminated copper.

Check out this scrap metal merchant's website I found earlier today, as an example. Their offer price for pure copper wire is US$3.45/lb. But their price for "bronze" is $2.40/lb, while "brass" is $2.00/lb. And I think US "coinage bronze" is technically a brass, since it's diluted with zinc instead of the traditional tin.

To the Forum.

I have a small glass jar of coppers on one of my bookcases, into which go the very few copper cents I receive from the very few cash transactions I do these days. I used to pull the copper cents out of boxes I searched and toss them in there, but I haven't searched a box in over 5 years. I'm sure they'll end up in a Coinstar machine some day.

As has been argued many times here, it's simply not worth the time or effort. In my book if you're going to speculate on metals, "color up" and do PMs.

I've looked for this thread before but can never find it. Some guy about 10 years ago was selling something like 10 55-gallon Brute garbage cans full of cents. Perhaps it might make financial sense on that scale if you could transport them to the scrap yard cheaply... but man, what a lot of effort and logistics.

sell 100% copper rolls on ebay double your money. not fast but still good.

To add, I don't save them for financial reasons for the most part. I enjoy hunting for them in change. Even my wife can pick a lot of them out just by look without even checking the date. So it adds a little excitement to the day lol. Find the coppers in a few brown cents you get back in change. Or find a full red from 1977 or a brick red cent from 1962. Or an S. It fuels the coin collecting hobby at no cost. It's fun. Maybe some day 50 years from now, someone opens a roll and finds some mint red ones or fills an album with them.

Holy moly, that's a lot, @nss-52! What is your plan for them?

Working on filling up my second jumbo popcorn piggy bank of there guys