Is It Worth The Effort To Search Anything But Halves?

For us, it has been in order of productivity: nickels, pennies, dimes, and in distant fourth place, quarters.

"...my campus bank..."

Who's bringing half dollar coins to a college bank branch? Someone's desperate for "real" money for the bars, right there...

When I was in college, lo those many years ago... My local bank branch (well off-campus, in a mainly townie neighborhood) gave me in teller withdrawals, maybe several weeks apart, (2) different fairly crisp $5 notes from the 1950s or so. One was a silver cert., one a Fed Res note.

What is special about that 1939 Nickel? I found 3 of those the other day.

Always perplexes me when someone asks, 'what's worth hunting, what's worth collecting.' I have to assume these questions are asked as relates to profit and/or fast money rather than the joy of collecting.

I guess I am too simple or easily amused. The other day my LCS let me search his box of junk silver quarters. I found 4 with a S mintmark. Finding S mintmarks in circulating coinage on the gulf coast is a reason to celebrate. Forget the silver, it's a S mint!

I've had incredible luck searching dime rolls, cents are very fun as are nickels. You dont even need to stack or invest to find it fun, its just a good time finding treasure in what we use every day.

If you are looking for silver, You have to search a lot of Halves at this point to find some to build a stack up, but seems like there's a decent amount of 40% silvers still out there vs. the 90%ers, and that means dumping a lot back to banks, which they will just store in their vault for the next time someone asks. your dump bank is someone else's search bank, your search bank is someone else's dump bank, at some point it all dries up unless you find a bank nobody else is searching but generally speaking they don't want to pay the fees to get rid of the searched through halves so they hang on to them for the next person that shows up looking for rolls of them and they have already been picked clean. Halves and dollar coins just don't get asked for much except by silver hunters.

The silver is mostly gone from circulation at this point, although it does turn up from time to time if you can get fresh boxes from distribution, but then the banks hate you when you dump them on them.

I don't know. If you are searching for silver, no roll hunting is extremely productive, although you can have lucky searches from time to time. Quarters at least for me have been a dead end since the State Quarters, I still find silver in dime rolls occasionally.

If you are filling coin albums from circulation finds, then yeah I'd say any of them can be productive, but I find nickels to have more of the older dates out there still with pennies as a close 2nd.
It's been a really long time since I've found a pre-1965 quarter in any roll I've hunted, years.

People have been hunting silver from circulation for 50+ years now, the new thing is hunting copper, but these machines that sort based on weight or composition that have come out in the last decade or so have really cleaned up the circulating supply out there. there's ebay sellers selling 5000 cents a bag just dumping rolls through sorters, separating out the copper cents and making a buck as "unsearched" copper cents. I'm sure business's that handle a lot of change have sorters like this also. For sure my local casinos have sorters/rollers and I'm sure just like coinstar, the silvers and foreigns get rejected.

I searched half dollars a bit but it quickly became a pain, and banks turned against me, and just, no, it wasn't fun for me, and there really isn't that much out there anymore to justify the effort, although there's some Youtubers making some fast money making people THINK silver is everywhere in half dollars.

Good luck in your hunting!

I agree

If you do search halves, you need to do it in VOLUME.

I agree, most circulated silver is gone, but people dumping old collections keeps the streaks alive.

I think CENTS and Nickles would be the most productive and profictable. But as others stated, why are you searching; for profit or the JOY of searching?


CENTS have more variety, RPMS, DDO's, OVM, WAMs, ETC, that can be profitable. I sold a 1999 WAM MS62-RB for $203 on ebay in june 2010

Nickles, seem to have more silver because searching them is more tedious and silver doesn't stick out like the edge searching on dimes and halves.


What has worked for me is establishing report with the tellers, being honest about what your doing. They have helped save me "old" coins and wrappers and even silver. It helps getting solid rolls from an old collection at the teller window than trying to hunt them over the next 6 months in random boxes.

Either way, is it worth it? If yo enjoy it, yes. If you make money, yes. If you don't make money, yes.