Save your pennies

[wabmester]

The best solution, Velde said, would be to "rebase" the penny by making it worth five cents rather than one cent. Doing so would increase the amount of five-cent coins in circulation and do away with the almost worthless one cent coin.

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[honobob]

Knock yourselves out with real estate, guys. I'm putting my money elsewhere for a while.

Wab! Why didn't you say you had a plan?

 

[wabmester]

I would like to withdraw $1M. All in pennies, please.

 

[bssc]

If the promise of a 500% return doesn't make people want to hoard pennies, I don't know what will.

 

[Peaceful_Warrior]

So I guess the trick is to go to the bank and take out as many pennies as possible, sort throughand keep all of the ones dated prior to 1982, and then return the rest to the bank....

 

[wstu32]

 

[jdw_fire]

Changing the official value of pennies is stupid. If they are too expensive to make just stop making them.

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

The problem is what to do with the ones in circulation. This sort of solves that problem.

As usual my timing is lacking. I just took our collective buttload of pennies to one of those coin counter machines at the grocery store. They used to charge a fee but now they'll put your full amount into a wide variety of gift certificates for places like amazon and starbucks.

I could have been sitting on a small fortune in faux nickels....

 

[jdw_fire]

The problem is what to do with the ones in circulation. This sort of solves that problem.

When they hit financial insitutions pull them from circulation. What number remains become collector's items.

Or the treasury could call them in like they did with Silver Certificates.

 

[Martha]

The U.S. Mint estimates that there are 200,035,318,672 pennies in circulation. http://www.kokogiak.com/megapenny/twelve.asp

Multiply that number by five.