Learn to love your coins.
That’s the message from Kevin McColly, CEO of Coinstar, the company behind those coin-operated machines you see in supermarkets.
American consumers made only 16% of their payments in cash in 2023, according to the Federal Reserve. A 2022 Pew survey found that two-fifths of consumers never use cash.
More: The last pennies in recent circulation will be auctioned in December. How much could they bring?
By now, most Americans know that the US Mint will stop making money. Some companies began reporting coin shortages even before the last pennies were stamped.
President Donald Trump has ordered the Treasury to stop minting pennies because their production cost exceeds their value. (Intriguingly, the same is true for nickel.)
Many Americans view both nickels and dimes as more nuisance than currency. The typical household has $60 to $90 in loose change, enough to fill one or two pint-sized beer mugs, according to the Federal Reserve. Americans throw away millions of dollars in coins every year, literally treating them like trash.
McColly believes we should change the way we think about coins.
To state the obvious, coins are worth money. Coinstar converts $3 billion in coins into spendable cash each year, one coin jar at a time. The average jar provides $58 in purchasing power.
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Most of us don’t realize how much our coins are worth. Thus, a trip to a currency exchange kiosk (or a bank or credit union) can yield a pleasant surprise.
“People underestimate the value of their jar by about half,” McColly said, speaking to USA TODAY earlier this year. “It’s a wonderfully enjoyable experience. People have this sense of found money.”
Certain groups of Americans — lower-income households and those over 55 — still use a lot of cash, the Fed found, along with people who prefer to shop in person.
As for the rest of us, McColly thinks it’s time for a paradigm shift. Don’t think of your coins as clutter. Think of them as recyclables.
“They’re metal,” he said, in case I needed a reminder. “And they have a long, useful life.”
The Treasury is still minting more than 5 billion coins a year, although the figure is declining, according to the journal CoinNews.
“These are just natural resources that come out of the Earth,” McColly said: copper-plated zinc for money, copper-nickel alloys for nickels, dimes and quarters.
His point: If Americans were serious about collecting their idle coins and “recycling” them into the monetary system, the Mint wouldn’t need to make so many new ones.
Of course, McColly has a vested interest. His company collects a small portion of the coins that consumers deposit.
“You can go to your own bank or credit union and pay no fees,” said Kimberly Palmer, personal finance expert at NerdWallet. Both NerdWallet and Bankrate offer tips on exchanging coins for cash. Most banks will take an account holder’s coins for free, Bankrate reports, but not all, and you may have to drop the coins yourself.
McColly notes that Coinstar generally waives the fee if the depositor chooses to trade coins for a retail gift card rather than cash.
He’s not alone in predicting a future for the penny, nickel and their more profitable relatives.
“We’ve been much slower than parts of Europe and Asia in adopting mobile payments and contactless credit cards,” said Ted Rossman, senior industry analyst at Bankrate.
More: The North East Grocer is offering a 2 for 1 offer on pennies on coin down days
The pandemic has been a timely reminder of how much we still rely on cash: consumers and business owners have been sitting on their coins amid a global shutdown, creating a real coin shortage.
“It kind of froze the whole system,” Rossman said.
As it turns out, removing the penny creates new problems. As America gets rid of pennies, the New York Times reported, the nation will soon find itself awash in nickels.
The government loses almost three cents for every penny it mints. On a nickel, it loses almost nine cents. More nickels would mean steeper losses.
America could kill both the penny and the nickel, the two losers on its currency list.
But without pennies or nickels, how would a consumer pay a 15-cent tab?
You may round each price to the nearest 10 cents. But then, what happens to the quarter?
And so on.
Do you own an old penny worth a million dollars? Experts say that is highly unlikely.
You may have seen one of the many headlines about valuable coins in circulation. “$124 Million Lincoln Wheat Penny You Could Have At Home,” reads one. But the reality is that most pennies are worth a cent, or maybe a little more.
The reality doesn’t live up to the hype, says an expert.
“There are million dollar coins, but there are no $100 million coins,” said Donn Pearlman, spokesman for the Professional Numismatists Guild (PNG), a nonprofit organization made up of many of the nation’s rare coin experts. “Only a few Lincoln cents dated between 1909 and 1958 with the design of wheat stalks on the reverse (“wheat pennies”) have sold for $1 million or more.”
The most valuable U.S. coin ever, a $20 gold piece, a 1933 “Double Eagle” coin, sold for $18.9 million at auction in 2021. The most valuable pennies, which are rare but likely still in circulation, are 1943 Lincoln copper pennies, a few of which were accidentally produced as the U.S. zinc effort said it was used for to save the copper for the effort of John II Mondial. Feigenbaum, editor of the Greysheet rare coin price guide.
In rare cases, some 1,943 pennies have sold for a million dollars, while one sold for more than $200,000 at an auction in 2019.
Depending on their condition, these 1943 Lincoln wheat pennies would be worth between $100,000 and $250,000, Feigenbaum said.
But the likelihood of having an almost priceless penny is similar to “saying your lottery ticket could be worth $100,000. Of course, anything is possible, right? But it’s not likely,” said Feigenbaum, who is also PNG’s executive director.
The so-called “wheat pennies” take their name from the reverse of the coin, featuring stalks of wheat surrounding the text “One Cent”. They were produced from 1909 to 1958. After that, the wheat stalks were trimmed and the pennies began to display an engraving of the Lincoln Memorial.
Most Lincoln wheat pennies are not super valuable and are only worth a few cents more than a cent. However, some can escalate into the hundreds of dollars, depending on condition and when minted. Certain crops, especially those with minting errors, can be worth thousands. You can see the NGC price guide here.
But headlines about super-valuable “Lincoln wheat pennies” stretch the imagination. Most likely, headlines are created by artificial intelligence to drive traffic to a website, Feigenbaum said.
“These coins are unlikely to change people,” he said.
Still, all the online interest has led to “coin shops being flooded with these people who think they have something rare, but they don’t,” Feigenbaum said.
Increased interest in the coins has led to overvalued coins being sold on eBay and Etsy. Counterfeit Lincoln wheat money made in China is sold.
“If we’ve seen these coins … somebody gets taken advantage of every now and then,” Feigenbaum said.
Even though the most valuable coins are usually in collections and have been very publicly “sold and resold,” Feigenbaum said, sometimes people can inherit a stash of well-preserved coins or buy some at an estate sale. Some tips:
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Read your coins. While there are apps you can use to check your coins, they aren’t always accurate. But you can check the value of the coins in “The 2026 Red Book: A Guide Book of United States Coins,” available in bookstores and online at Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble. “It answers all kinds of questions, like, ‘Oh, if I’m thinking of collecting Lincoln cents, what can I expect to pay?’ said Feigenbaum, one of the book’s editors. “You will see in that book that there are no cents in a million dollars.”
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Go and note your coins. You can have your coins authenticated for value, just like jewelry, from several services, including CAC, the Numismatic Assurance Company, and the Professional Coin Grading Service.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: With Penny Gone, How to Know If You Have One That’s Valuable