Letting Go Is The Hardest Thing To Doooooo....

Good for you! If they were just sitting in a bucket, there's no point in hanging onto them.

Hope you can get your camera soon.

I am conflicted, but you do what you have to do.

It took me a good long while to work up the guts to do it. I regret that I didn't sell them all in about 2011 when copper was about double what it is now... I might have been able to make a decent profit after shipping, ebay fees etc. But I didn't need the money then and just let the hoard grow.

Theoretically, I cashed $150 worth of copper for $110. That is markedly more than a metal recycler would give; there were no local buyers, and that $40 profit would vanish between the 13% ebay fee and the rising costs of shipping, even if the buyer paid a big chunk of it.

What I dumped was probably 60-75% of my whole cent collection; just the worn, scratched, brown ones while the bright and shiny ones sit in my collection proper.

Will they eventually face the same fate? I honestly don't know. At one point I planned to dump everything and use that money to buy every 1959-present mint and proof set, and just be done with it. I haven't done that yet; not sure if I ever will.

What I can say is that I plan to work through my quarter and half holdings; Probably $200 face of each. US moderns just don't really "do" it for me since branching into real collector coins. I guarantee that I will spend more time looking at my XF Caracalla denarius than a dusty bucket of copper pennies.

True, but there is no reason to have that many dollar coins (or half dollars or quarters) in regular commerce. We will continue to use any of the remaining larger paper notes (two dollar, five dollar, and so on).

Wow!

It really amazes me how some people can pull such a mind boggling amount of copper cents, and there are still plenty to go around in circulation!

What about all of those quarters?

I have not used a laundromat in a while, but I was glad when the car wash started accepting dollar coins. It is a lot easier to feed two dollar coins in than eight quarters.

Do not even get me started on trying to feed dollar bills into the machine with wet hands.

Possibly.

The real problem is I am trying to get an extra dollar in before the timer goes down. No time to put the wand down (let alone dry my hands). I can just set an extra coin or two on the edge, walk by, grab and drop, two more minutes! If I have to grab a dollar out of my pocket, that is even more time wasted.

I never want to insert more than the minimum to start because sometimes the wash goes easy, sometimes I come across some road kill I had not noticed.


I can see how that would help with the crinkled ones.