Man pays off mortgage with 800 pounds of pennies

[bbcustoms]

I really thought Zenops would have been all over this. He started collecting in the 70's so there is a pretty good chance he has a lot of real copper pennies in those boxes.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...=feeds-newsxml

[J-hop]

Haha, I couldnt imagine being the teller that day.

I may have done my math wrong but I'm getting a range of ~341-424lbs that his payment could have weighed not 800lbs????

[swak]

Originally posted by J-hop

I may have done my math wrong but I'm getting a range of ~341-424lbs that his payment could have weighed not 800lbs????

... Either way, its a shitload of pennies!

[C_Dave45]

Originally posted by swak




... Either way, its a shitload of pennies!

x2! Seems like an awful lot of work just for $620. Could've collected pop bottles and made 10 times the money or 1/10th the effort.
Pennies...

[ZenOps]

Naw. I like nickel nickels.

The only reason I keep copper pennies is becuase they are probably going to stop circulation around the September timeframe.

There is only one nickel mine in North america. The relative scarcity of nickel throughout this century has put the value of nickel to be higher than silver (1942-46) to the point where a $100 box would buy 40 barrels of oil (1970) and a US dollar value of $1.60 per ounce (2007)

Copper coinage has never had a value of more than 3 ounces being worth a meal or so. Which is exactly where the Euro is, thirty 10-cent euros is 3 Euros, which is 3.5 ounces of copper, which will aproximately buy a meal. The exact copper coinage to meal ratio that nearly a billion europeans use.

Aluminum at one time was worth more than gold. Now thats a history lesson worth hunting down.

[ZenOps]

Each US pre-1982 copper penny is 3.11 grams or exactly 1/10th of a troy ounce.

62,000 copper pennies would be 424 pounds.
62,000 zinc pennies would be 341 pounds.

But its unlikely that they were copper pennies. Most penny hoarders in the US get rid of their "zincers" which are post-1982.

62,000 pennies placed in standard $25 boxes (3.5x4x8.5 inches, slightly larger than a masonry brick, but smaller than a structural concrete brick) would only be 24.8 boxes of pennies.

If you can (and many many people do) sort through 1 box of pennies a week, you could have $620 in a matter of half a year. Perhaps more importantly you would have 424 pounds of copper, which historically would buy you ~ 1900 meals.

Assuming the US electronic or paper dollar somehow fails.

[J-hop]

Originally posted by swak




... Either way, its a shitload of pennies!

I agree, I just found it weird that multiple articles would quote a weight so out to lunch. It wasn't even remotely believable when I first read it so I had to calculate it out haha.