"Junk Copper" - Worth Holding On To Or Dumping?

in order to make any significant profit you would have to horde industrial quantities of the stuff. calculate inflation while waiting for it to be legal to melt (which it might never be), handling (a 45 gallon drum on pennies weighs about 8,000 lbs - how do you plan on moving that?) etc and I don't think it's worth it at all. dump them and move on, life's too short to horde unless it's silver and gold.

I keep my copper cents to prevent them from being melted.

At some point they are going to be melted. It may be by the people (legally or illegally) or by the government (to reclaim the metal after the cent is withdrawn from circulation). I just want to make sure my kid has something to look through in the future.

I see lots of folks hoarding copper but I'm not clear on the objectives. I'm skeptical that the laws will ever change to allow currency to be destroyed unless the government plans to reclaim and then, I suspect that they'll reclaim for face value or about so. If you are collecting them from a numismatic standpoint, that would make more sense to me, but to what extent? Mintages would seem to dictate which ones to hoard and which ones to pass along. Grade of coin factors into which ones I will set aside myself. I'm not worried about 'green' cents; they don't make the cut unless they are semi-key/key and then I'll conserve them and keep them separate from the lot of AU+ coins.

I suppose that's why I find it amazing that folks here are making money selling coppers on ebay to folks I can only assume will one day hope to 'corner the market'. I'm with the school of thought here which think that turning the Lincolns, copper or zinc, keeps the hobby shop (desk, kitchen table, whatever) cleaner and more organized and frees up cash to do other things in the hobby (CRH turns, purchases, etc.). Along this line, I have a stash of coppers I keep moving from here to there waiting for me to get around to searching for varieties. I have no intention of keeping many of them and to be honest, I need to make it a priority. Time to practice what I'm preaching. But that said, to each their own. While it doesn't make sense to me, it may to others and I respect their positions about it. And I've been wrong more than once, so take my opinion for what its worth - a few cents.

Yeah - the main reason I got into keeping coppers was because of my grandpa. He kept all his copper pennies and I got them when he passed away. I'd say probably a few hundred dollars worth, many of them (mainly the 70's and 81/82) are still red and in good shape. He had kept them in milk jugs that had started to fall apart so I bought a big vase and put them all in it as a keep sake. I thought it was fun looking through them so I have started CRH myself keeping the good condition coppers, LWCs, canadian cents, etc. I don't think I will get rich off them but I figured someday the values could go up and I will have a lot of them. I have no plans to sell or get rid of them though (especially my grandpa's set).

I keep the copper pennies so long as it doesn't take up too much space. I am not a CRH, but just from pocket change. When it gets to take up too much space I would sell it for silver...I hope.

On one side... if you have the pennies... and say in 4-8 yrs you can sell them for their copper content for 2-5 cents, you will have done GREAT. At a 500% return in less than 10yrs it would be the investment return of a lifetime!

If it takes more than 8 years you have to start to think that the money you have stashed could've been put to better use...

And what if after 15 years you're still NOT allowed to sell 'em for their copper content.. you're left with a bunch of pennies and due to inflation you have actually LOST money if you're just sitting on it.


To me those are all the positives and negatives... In Canada we've already gotten rid of using the penny in our daily transactions. But I suspect that we're only going to get closer to selling them for melt when the U.S. does the same.

I personally have some pennies... I thought of an investment sum that would be significant gains if it went up by 100-500% yet would not be so significant if I lost say 2.5%/yr due to inflation.. Looking at the figures I cam up with a number as a "penny" stock investment.. And that is a number I'm happy with... only time will tell if it was the right move or the wrong one..