Should I spend the time to check a five gallon bucket full of pennies?

i dont believe so

the buffalo wheat pennies or something like that are “valuable” according to my father, but some how i doubt its worth it

http://coins.about.com/library/coin_values/bl_wheat_cents.htm

found a link

According to that link the most valuable would probably be about 10 cents. Take them to the bank for real money and spend your time doing something that will make you more than 20 cents per hour.

NOT to mention
you have approx 7771 pennies per gallon

so have fun digging through approx 38855 pennies…..

which at 1 penny a second, would still take 10 hours and 47 min (again approx) to look through

HAPPY HUNTING

But you could leave them to your grandkids and let them do it. Maybe by then some of them will be.

I would pour them into a coinstar and go out for a nice dinner.

In your will, specify that these pennies are to be kept untouched, unspent, and unlost for 100 years. At that point, your descendants can crack it open and see if they’re worth anything.

Or you can be an artist and glue them to your living-room wall, making a mural that is a testament to the virtues of frugality and the American spirit.

BIG MONEY=If any of the pennies have V.D.B. on them!!!

I’d do it if I were you but I’m a coin collector. As I see it, you’re not going to get rich, but 35 years, that’s 1974, the so-called “wheat” penny was minted until 1959. That means to me that there is a VERY good chance that you will find SEVERAL wheat pennies, which may not amount to a TON of money, if you’re looking to get rich, you’d need a lot more than, what was it, 38k pennies, but you WILL almost certainly find several that are worth between 2 cents and maybe a quarter, and you MAY find one or two REALLY valuable ones, you just never know. Just my gut feeling as a collector based on how often I find pennies that are not run of the mill, I’d say you’re likely to find maybe 1 out of every 500 pennies (so about 80 pennies give or take) that are worth probably an average of let’s say 4 cents each, so you’ll only make like $2.40 on the project. But what I’d do is pull aside one of each date/mint mark, the best one you cand find and get some Whitman folders and see how complete of a collection (and how far back) you can get. That may be worth quite a pretty penny pun intended to your kids or grandkids some day. But you are very unlikelty to get rich. I guess if that’s your sole motivation, just buy a lottery ticket, your odds are just as good if not better. I’m just saying that if you’ve been collecting for 35 years, the oldest additons are going to have a far higher ratio of valuable to non valuable coins.

380 dollars…..

buy a shit ton of lotto tickets…. youll be out 380 dollars that is pure over head, and with that many tickets, youll have to win something…..

@kibaxcheza – you’d probably almost definitely net more money by turning the pennies into cash. That’s how the lottery works, for every $380 spent, they probably return about $150.

yes, but then there is still the chance you could pick 275 million

and i would not mind that at all lol

I’d recommend running them through a coinstar (or other coin counting machine)—they’ll tend to kick out the more valuable coins since they tend to be irregular or off-weight.

@grumpyfish – if it’s just pennies, pretty much all pennies, even Indian Heads from 1909 and before, weigh the same and will go through…the only ones a coin counting machine is likely to kick out would be foreign coins that look like pennies, and the vast majority of foreign coins that look like pennies are worth less than a penny (unless they happen to be a collectible vintage). And if one WAS going to just forgo the possibility of getting one penny of value in return for the few pennies that are worth more than a penny, it makes a LOT more sense to use your bank’s coin sorters, even if you have to bring them to the cashier, because Coinstar charges you a percentage.

@kibaxcheza – If you look at the odds of winning Powerball (not sure what lottery runs where you live or where @Kazz lives), you have a one in 195,249,054 chance of winning the top prize. So if you waited several weeks for the jackpot to get to $275M (might take as much as a year before it gets that high) 380 tickets, you odds of winning are 380/195,249,054 or 1in 513,813.3. Your odds of getting hit by lightning are 1 in 576,000. Basically, checking the odds at the Powerball website, it appears you would likely win one $7 prize, 3 $4 prizes and 6 $3 prizes, total $37, or less than 10% of your investment.

It would make a lot more sense to sell the coins to me, I’d run it through my own coin counter, pay the face value, then I’d sort through them all and take out the ones I wanted. In fact, if you have no interest in going through them yourself, @Kazz, I’d suggest putting up an ad on Craig’s List and seeing if any collectors wanted to buy the jar from you for more than the estimated number of pennies inside.

thats why its called gambling…

investing 101: high risk high reward