Collectors commonly save coins from each mint. There are currently two mints, one in Philadelphia and one in Denver. But other cities had mints in the past, most notably San Francisco. There were also mints in Carson City, NV, New Orleans, LA, and Dahlonega, GA. Coins from a particular mint can be more valuable than coins from a different mint, particularly if that mint only was in operation for a short period of time.
Remember-
Time you enjoy wasting is never wasted.
Yes, I know. But SpoilerVirgin (for example) is filling a jar, so it’s not a question of mint-marks, nor of keeping coins in a better ‘grade,’ as a numismatist would typically wish.
I save wheaties when I find them.
I have a bunch of Bicentennial quarters including some in proof sets. I doubt they will be worth all that much as they minted so many of them.
I like to collect nickels older than me as they are the oldest US coins that you can find in change normally. I was born in 1954.
I buy a mint and proof set of coins every year. Just received 2013 proof set last week.
I collect nickels from earlier than my birth year as well. 
I think the issue with the America the Beautiful quarters is that there are just too many of the state quarters floating around. When they first started minting the state quarters, a lot of people were collecting them and taking them out of circulation. The mint liked this: That was after all the goal, since coins that get minted but not circulated are effectively profit for the mint. And so they minted more quarters than the circulation demanded, to fill the demand for both circulation and collections. But then after a while, people got bored with collecting the quarters, and at least stopped hoarding new ones, and in some cases dumped the ones they had been hoarding back into circulation. So now there are a lot more quarters in circulation than they need, and so they don’t need to make nearly as many new ones as normal until that surplus gradually wears away by attrition. But coins last a long time, so that’ll take a while.
Worse feeling in the world - finding an incredibly old looking coin - well worn - “gah, this thing is ancient” - then getting a look at the date to find out its younger than you.
didn’t use to happen as often as it now does.
If your first sentence is actually true, then yes, it’s worth the time and effort.
I refer, of course to the effect that “amateur” implies that you’re doing it because you love doing it.
When you stop loving doing it, you might want to consider stopping doing it, absent some expectation that continuing to do it will result in you gathering together a lasting legacy for your heirs.
Pennies are no longer copper now. They’re clad coins, because the copper in them was too costly. I like elongated coins/squished pennies, and I have a stash of cleaned pennies that were minted in 1982 or earlier, because that’s when it changed.
This applies to all pre-1983 US pennies that are 95% copper, not just wheat pennies. All of these pennies are currently worth just over double their monetary value as scrap. A pound of pre-1983 (95% coppers) includes about 145 of them and the current scrap value of copper is just north of $3/lb. Post-1982 pennies are 99% zinc, and they still cost more to make than they’re worth.
Keeping the penny around is useless. The nickel, too. US pennies and nickels both cost more to mint than their monetary value and you can’t buy shit with a pocket full of either. They don’t get used because they’re basically value-less and so they spend their life in between change buckets and trips to Coinstar or bank counting machines. Useless. Get rid of both of them and probably the dime, too. While we’re at it, let’s get rid of the terribly cost-inefficient dollar bills and mint some $1, $2 and/or $3 coins to fill those newly empty till slots. Let’s upgrade the $50 bill to where the $20 bill was 25 years ago and it will have the same buying power now as the $20 did then.
Cash should be useful. Coins ought to be useful. If you can’t buy a goddamned thing with one of them, it’s obsolete and a nuisance. Cash is dying anyway, despite my affection for it. Let’s pretend to at least try to keep it useful. I’m almost 42 years old and we use the same coins and bills in this country as we did the day I way born. $1 in 1971 has the buying power of 18 goddamned cents today, but we use the same denominational currency. It’s retarded and shameful.
For the record, 1976 quarters and all post-1964 quarters are about 92% or 5.2g copper, plus 8% nickel. These quarters have less than double the scrap value of copper pennies. There were almost 1.7 billion Bicentennial quarters struck. With very rare exceptions, they are worth one quarter of a US dollar and will remain so indefinitely.
Well, they are the gayest of all the quarters.
If I encounter one of these, I’ll try to hold on to it for a while, but it’s not a big deal if it gets spent or cashed in. In fact, I have a few half-dollars and at least one Sackie dollar in my piggy bank, so these will be cashed in soon. The two-dollar bill in my wallet, however, has personal significance and I would never spend that, but other two-dollar bills are fair game.
I have a huge jar of wheat pennies my mother collected for decades. Since her passing I’ve found myself doing the same thing. Ditto for my husband. We each get a small thrill every time we find one, and into the jar it goes.
I figure at some point when I’m old and gray it’ll be worth something.
My dad sort of collected wheat pennys and other coin related odds and ends the same way for most of his life. I kind of picked up the habit. Just can’t spend a wheat penny.
When dad passed away my mom presented me with a shoebox full of that stuff to organize. My sister found out mom gave me a “box of money”, a fight ensued and now my BIL has the box and claims it is his long lost collection from his childhood. I doubt the value of the coins in that box are worth the animosity they have created. Whatever you do, dispose of your precious coin collection before you go.
I started hoarding pennies when I was a kid, back in the 50s, when all pennies were “wheats” . . . except for the occasional Indian head. I still hoard pennies, and have hundreds of rolls of the copper pre-1982s. Most of them aren’t worth much, with one exception: a 1914-D, which I found in a parking lot. I put up a notice on the supermarket’s bulletin board, but got no serious responses.
The '50s were a great time to collect coins from pocket change. We still got Indian Head pennies, Buffalo nickels, Mercury dimes, Liberty Standing quarters and Walking Liberty halves.
I got lucky, there. Both Dad and G (Mom’s second husband) collected pocket change that ‘will be worth something some day.’ When she was first diagnosed, Mom took me on a tour of the house to show me where all the various coin stashes were. There were small boxes of rolled silver quarters and dimes. There were jars. There were tins.
Then, I think just in their memory, Mom started filling pill bottles with quarters or dimes. They were all over. That’s not the lucky part. The lucky part was that after the memorial service, my sisters and I did a sweep. We decided what should probably be sold and what was just change. We divided the change (and the cash - Mom had more than a few stashes of folding money) and I sold the silver and sent them their checks. There has been mercifully little drama.
When my dad was a kid his mother was the office manager at a place that had a vending machine. It dispensed whatever it was it dispensed for 1c. She would let my dad go through the collected change, replacing pennies he took with pennies of his own. He has an impressive collection (to my eyes, anyway) starting at 1909 and barely missing a single penny until the late fifties. He doesn’t have that one that’s worth a couple of million dollars–I checked 