Bucket of Coins

I have bought bags of 1000 wheat pennies from my local coin shop for $0.05 apiece or $50. Of course you have to assume they have been searched, but I have been able to almost fill a few Lincoln folders and the best date so far are two 1909 VDBs. It’s fun going through these old cents that have been around for almost 100 years in some cases. There are several varieties and repunched mint marks to look for along with other errors such as lamination errors, clips, and off-center minting.

Also it wasn’t long ago that people were starting hoarding pre-1982 cents when they were worth over $0.02 just in copper value. Unfortunately I checked today and it looks like a copper cent is worth $0.009 so a little less than face in copper value.  Right now it’s illegal to melt Jefferson nickels and Lincoln cents for bullion so if you feel like speculating, those coins may be a good thing to hoard.

Well Christmas has come and gone for 2008. It’s been a good year with the exception of my wife’s grandmother, whom we were all close to, passed away in October.  She was truly a great woman and anyone who met her was blessed.

It was her mother that had cigar box of Indian head cents. On the box it says $5.19 Indian head pennies.

Of course when it was given to me, there wasn’t one Indian Head penny in the box. So there was no telling what was in there. My wife said that her great-grandmother was quite a hoarder as a result of the living through the Great Depression of the 1930′s in the United States.

Even though there were no Indian Head Cents in the box, there were 15 rolls of silver quarters! There were twenty silver standing liberty and the rest were silver Washington quarters. Several of them were worn but the majority were About Uncirculated or better.

So over the break I was able to almost fill a Dansco 1932 to 1964 Silver Washington Quarter book. I had the 1932-D Silver Washington quarter and the 1932-S Silver Washington quarter already in my collection.  I have many left over that I plan on saving and checking for cherrypicking at a later date to look for variations and errors.