Hello Ladies and Gentlemen,
Today I am going to share with you one of the best kept secrets of the US Monetary System and show you how to use this information to your advantage. Though it is fairly common knowledge, Many people still don't know that common coinage such as Half Dollars, Quarters, Dimes, Nickels, and Pennies used to contain precious metals before a certain date. Once the demand & price for silver started to rise in the 1950's early 60's, the mints decided that it was no longer prudent to use silver and switched over to using the Nickel clad design that we are familiar with today. None of the newer minted coins contain silver or copper unless it was made for special reasons (such as collectors sets).
Now, I know what you are thinking, Coins?!?! How boring! That's exactly what I thought too! But, one day, I noticed that Silver and Gold were starting to rise and that I wanted to investing in precious metals. Of course, at the time I didn't have thousands of dollars to pour into the Silver market and so I decided to search around and see what kind of tactics I can dig up in order to obtain cheap Silver.
This is when I found the hobby "Coin Roll Hunting" or "CRH" for short. The idea was to ask banks to give you rolled coins in exchange for your paper money. You look through the rolled coins for any silver, then take the coins back to your personal "dump" bank and turn them back into paper currency (there is major tricks to this last step, Ill cover that shortly).
I started my new hobby around January 15th, 2016 and only do it 2 to 3 times a month. I have searched around $2,500 worth of coins (mostly Half Dollars and Dimes) and so far have found:
- 13 x 90% Half Dollar (Cost = $6.50)
- 9 x 40% Half Dollar (Cost = $4.50)
- 3 x 90% Quarter (Cost = $0.75)
- 7 x 90% Dime (Cost = $0.70)
- 1 x War Nickel (Cost = $0.05)
- 1 x Silver Peace Dollar (Cost = $1.00)
This equals a grand total of 7.906 Troy Ounces of silver, which I paid a total of $13.50 for. Face value for Silver coins?!? I must be dreaming. If that doesn't get you as giddy as a school girl inside, I don't know what will!
That is $154.32 worth of silver and a total of $140.82 in profit at current prices!!
I took $13.50 worth of Fiat Funny-money and turned it into $154.32 of real value. How can you beat that? Especially when you take into account that Silver could rise heavily in the future due to inflationary and economic woes. Now is the time to get on it!!
This method can easily be scaled up by having your bank order $500 boxes of halves for you each week but you need a bank account and $500 cash to play with for each box in order to do so. I don't have the luxury of having $500 bucks I can just sit on so I tend to only use around $200 dollars per time and I travel to multiple banks getting half dollars and dimes off of their tellers. Most banks only have a handful of halves because they are no longer actively in circulation. This means banks no longer stock half dollars and only have them when customers bring them in for deposit or exchange, which is good news for anyone coin hunting.
You see, Most people don't realize that some halves are worth more than face value. They could be cleaning out a deceased loved one's belongings and find tons of half dollars not knowing that some might be silver and turn them into the bank. There have even been situations where people find rolls and rolls of silver half dollars that someone deposited not knowing that they were a coin collection! It happens, and way more often than you think.
Now without further ado, let's begin the guide.
First off, I typically focus on half dollars and dimes. This is because for the majority of time CRH has been a hobby (since the 70's) Quarters have always been highly targeted, because of this it is much much harder to find pre-1964 quarters in circulation today. War nickels are another heavily sought after coin. This is because it was only made for 3 years, from 1942 to 1945, and was only produced because the military needed the Nickel content for use in armor during WWII. The War Nickel consists of 95% silver and 5% zinc and typically has a darker coloration than your average nickel. Since War Nickels were only made for 3 years and are heavily collected, they are also extremely hard to find in circulation today.
This leaves Half dollars and Dimes for searching, as well as pennies (which I will cover next). Half dollars are by far the best coin to search for Silver because it was not the main focus of CRH's until the last decade or two. Half dollars are also not circulated as much as they used to be and because of this tend to not be searched through as often. Dimes fall into second place as best coin to search, this is because they are small and this has always turned CRH's off from searching them, they also only contain a small amount of silver due to their size.
Here is a complete list of coins to look out for:
- 1965-1969 Half Dollars - Contains 40% silver (0.1479 troy ounces)
- Pre-1964 Half Dollars - Contains 90% silver (0.3617 troy ounces)
- Pre-1964 Dime - Contains 90% silver (0.0723 troy ounces)
- Pre-1964 Quarter - Contains 90% silver (0.1808 troy ounces)
- 1942-1945 War Nickel - Contains 95% silver (0.0563 troy ounces)
- Peace/Morgan Dollars - Contains 0.7735 troy ounces of silver
- Pre-1982 Penny - Contains 95% copper / 5% zinc (2.95 grams of copper)
Step 1: Take $100+ and go to multiple banks in your area. I looked on google maps and figured out a giant loop to and from my house that hits the most bank branches possible. Some banks will want you to have an account before they will allow you to exchange and some won't. I have found that the larger banks such as Bank of America and Wells Fargo tend to allow you to exchange without an account, where as the smaller credit unions will want you to have an account. The first trip will be a bit of trial and error until you figure out which banks are willing to work with you.
Once you get to the teller, ask if they have any "Morgan or Peace dollars" as well as "half dollars" that you can exchange for. They nearly always will have the small Susan B Anthony dollars and the golden Sacajewea dollars (not real gold) and sometimes even the large "Ike dollars". You only want Peace and Morgan silver dollars, all the rest are not worth your time. This is why I always asked specifically for "Morgan and Peace dollars, as well as half dollars" instead of "Dollar coins and half dollar coins" which in turn will get you them all.
If you ever get asked why, never mention silver!! Say that you are a coin collector and that you look through coins for rare dates and minting errors. This is important for two reasons, first, some tellers don't like CRH's and will tell you no since we represent extra work for them, and secondly because you do not want to create competition for yourself. If the teller doesn't know about CRH before she meets you, asking her about silver halves will definitely clue her in.
Once she brings you halves, buy them all, even if they are unrolled and you can tell there is no silver right away. You want to keep them happy with you so they don't mind doing this for you in the future, so don't waste their time by looking through the coins for silver and then turning her down! You might have a hard time finding tons of half dollars so as I go I also pick up rolled dimes and a box of pennies. This way you have many things to search even if your local bank branches don't have many half dollars in stock. Once you have all of their halves, repeat at the next bank until you have spent all of your cash on coins.
It should look something like this:
Step 2: Once you get home, dump out your rolls of coins and organize them so you can easily find everything. Start by unrolling one roll of half dollars and holding the stack in your hand. Look at the edges of the coins to see if any of them are solid silver. If you find a coin with solid silver sides remove it from the stack and check the date to be sure it is below 1970. If it is dated below 1964 then it is 90% silver and if it's below 1970 but above 1964 its 40% silver. Using this method will drastically cut down on your search time.
In the picture below, notice how a few of the coins have a completely solid silver edge. Can you spot the silvers coins in the picture below?
You are correct if you chose these two coins:
Utilizing the trick above will cut your search time down by over 80% but you need to be careful not to miss any silver coins. I typically do a quick edge check and then sort through them by hand afterwards to check for key dates and minting errors. Its definitely worth it to search for minting errors and rare dates as some of them are worth major money. You can find a detailed list of minting errors and rare dates @ coinflation.com (Bitnerd has no affiliation with this site).
Step 3: Find a bank to "Dump" your searched coins on. This is a very important part. Most banks do not like coin roll hunters because it costs them money to transport and roll all the coins we search. If someone is constantly dumping coins onto their branch, they are constantly having to take the financial burden of sorting them, rolling them, and transporting them with their armored car personnel to a more easily-accessible storage facility. This makes sure the coins will be available for the next bank branch to request a box of coins in that denomination. Knowing this, you now can see the value in dumping your coins wisely.
What I recommend is that you have a "Dump" bank and a handful of "Pickup" banks. The rule is you never dump your coins at a pick up bank and you never pick up coins at your dump bank. This helps insure you don't get yourself kicked out of any bank's branches as well as making sure you don't search the same roll of coins over and over.
You have two options for dumping your coins. The first and by far the easiest is to find a bank that allows their customers to use their coin counting machine for free. This machine is exactly the same as "Coinstar" but it doesn't charge you 5-10% each time you use it. This is very important because you do not want to lose 5% each time you cash in because you will be doing this very often and it will cut into your profits majorly.
The second option is to use banks like Wells Fargo which allow you to exchange up to $250 dollars worth of rolled coins each day. The caveat here is that you will have to roll the coins yourself before you go in to exchange them. None the less, this method works very well and most the time doesn't require you to have a bank account. Some Wells Fargo banks will want you to have an account with them but I have had branches that just want my ID and phone number in order to exchange coinage for paper currency. It depends alot on your current location and the standards of banking in your general area.
Step 4: Hoard your free silver until it reaches a good price and sell it to reap the rewards! Scale up if you have the available funds. You could have multiple bank accounts at "Pick up" banks and have each bank order you one or two $500 boxes of half dollars each week. You could easily search thousands of dollars worth of halves a week if you have the funds and the means to do so. Don't be discouraged if you can't afford a $500 box yet though, It is more work but traveling from bank to bank and picking up any unrolled half dollars they have laying around tends to be more profitable anyways.
Pennies: Pennies deserve their own section as many people focus on pennies solely. Any penny that is pre-1982 is 95% copper and currently worth 250% it's face value. It is very easy to find pre-1982 pennies still to this day in circulation and technically any money you are able to put into them you have effectively "Doubled" in value. The main idea is to hoard tons of copper pennies and wait for US coinage to be legal to melt for it's metal content. It is rumored that this will change in the future, but currently doesn't stop many people from melting their coins anyways. I do not advocate melting your coins by any means especially since you can literally sell your rolled coins for double on Ebay the second you get them. At least for 150% face value, if not 200%.
Here is the problems you will run into when searching pennies: 1. They are extremely bulky to store, $1000 dollars worth of pennies is 100's of pounds worth of weight and takes up quite a bit of space. 2. About 50% of the time when buying pennies from the bank you will receive a 25$ box of completely brand new uncirculated pennies which is completely of no use to you (except for searching through them for brand new mint errors). When this happens, I recommend saving the box unopened and just turning them in over and over until you receive a box of circulated pennies. 3. It is extremely embarrassing putting $100 bucks worth of pennies (10,000) into the loud ass coin counting machine for 15+ minutes while everyone in the branch is trying to count money and staring at you in utter frustration, lmao. You can see why most people opt to buy Silver/Gold instead of Copper ingots.
If, after all of that, searching pennies still sounds good to you it is definitely one of the easiest ways to make profit with coin roll hunting.
That is pretty much it! Coin roll hunting is a extremely fun hobby that actually gets you paid! I like to think of it as a mini-lottery that I don't have to pay for. You don't win every day but most the time you win something small and even have the chance to make 10-20 thousand. You just have to be extremely lucky and find a error or rare year!!! I am always satisfied when I find a new silver coin or two that I get to add to my collection.
Alright ladies and gents, get out there, start searching! Get to that bank and ask for those half dollars. ;) Finally, it is you that is positioned to profit from the banks instead of the other way around.
Here is some Silver bars I also purchased for the fun of it :)
