When One Penny Can Be Worth Almost Two Pennies

This is a 1969 copper penny. Did you know not all pennies have the same amount of copper? This penny has 95% copper and 5% zinc. The melt value of this penny is $0.0187815 so this one penny is worth almost 2 pennies.

The pennies that have 95% copper and 5% zinc have been minted from 1909 to 1982. I would always try to collect those pennies, but I would hardly see these types of pennies around.

Then all of a sudden I would see more and more of these pennies. What happened? Well, it is those change machines that recently came out. You see some people just want the cash. They dig up there old change so to buy groceries for instance.

Well, sometimes their change can be really old and nobody is checking for those types of pennies. So those change machines have to circulate the change that just came in. They are not going to check out every coin for a 95% copper penny.

So that is good for me. I guess if I really wanted to I could go to the bank and buy $5 worth of pennies and check for the 95% copper pennies.

So these change machines are like another way to mine for copper. Sure it is not a whole lot at a small scale. I have seen videos of people that collect these pennies.

Yes they may take some paper money and buy a bunch of heavy rolls of pennies. They have their basements full of containers of these 95% copper pennies.

I just seen a video where a guy says that he would go to a bank and buy $20 worth of pennies, then go through them to pick out the 95% copper pennies.

If you say, but what about all the other pennies? Well, with the rest of those pennies you could just bring those to one of the change machines and run it through for cash or even for a gift card. They provide a limited amount of gift cards.

Or you can take the cash. I have never used one of those change machines, but I heard they charge almost 11% of the face value of the coins put into that machine. To me that might be a rip off, cause out of $100 of coins they will take about $11.

The good thing though is that more and more of these copper pennies are going back into circulation from the change jars of people that are going straight into these change machines.

Happy hunting for the 95% copper pennies.

Sources 1, 2, 3

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Thank you, David.
Image is mine taken with my Moto G.