Nickels In My Change?

Most people keep anything before 1960. A lot of nickels were minted in 64 to account for the silver coins going out of circulation so others keep anything below that.

Nickels from 42 to 45 have the mint mark above the building on the back. Those are War Nickels and have some silver in them (35%).

Key dates you want to keep are 1950-D, 1938-S and 1939-D.

I would keep any proofs that may be in the bag, too. There is a nickel roll thread you might want to look at. The author is going though hundreds of rolls of nickels and keeping track of the rarer ones.

Edit: Also forgot about this:

There are also some counterfeit nickels that may still be in circulation. I don't know how to identify but some one else may be able to. I know some people collect them but I've never seen one.

the nickels worthwhile collecting are the silver ones issued during World War II from 1942-1945, like allranger stated. I feel 2009's are worth holding onto also because of the low mintage levels. Lots of people hoard pre-1960 nickels, even though I feel some 1960s nickels are becoming scarce (the ones from 1965-1967 seem hard to come by)

Of course, if you find any Buffalo nickels (or older) you will want to keep these also, even dateless ones.

Let us know if you find anything of interest when you are done.

Save all 1964 and 1999 Nickels. Both in the Billions made so if you pull out a real lot of them, I won't be seeing them all the time.
I suggest getting a copy of the Red Book by Whitman Publishing. Good basic information.

A friend runs a cash register at work and offered to look for coins for me. To make it simple, I told him to keep anything 64 and older and all half dollars. I never imagined how many 64 nickels he would find. He gives me about 20 a week. Now I know why. Oh well, I keep all nickels anyway.

I googled this to get some mintage numbers:

1964 P - 1,028,622,762
1964 D - 1,787,297,160

(Nickels dated 1964 were still being minted well into 1966, contributing to their very high mintages.) why would anyone save these? makes no sense

2009 P - 39,840,000
2009 D - 46,800,000

We haven't seen numbers that low since 1959.

Seems stupid these days to make a coin that supposedly costs .09 to make and its only worth a nickel