Learn to love your coins.
That’s the message from Kevin McAuley, CEO of Coinstar, the company behind those coin-cashing machines you see in supermarkets.
According to the Federal Reserve, US consumers will make only 16% of their payments in cash in 2023. A 2022 Pew survey found that two-fifths of consumers never use cash.
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By now, most Americans know that the US Mint does not make any money. Some businesses began reporting coin shortages before the last pennies were minted.
President Donald Trump ordered the Treasury to stop minting pennies because their production costs exceed their value. (Interestingly, the same is true of nickel.)
Many Americans regard both nickels and pennies as more of a nuisance than currency. According to the Federal Reserve, the typical household is sitting on $60 to $90 in spare coins, enough to fill one or two pint-size beer mugs. Americans throw away millions of dollar coins each year, literally treating them like trash.
McColly thinks we need to change the way we think about coins.
To state the obvious, coins are worth money. Coinstar converts $3 billion of coins into spendable cash each year, one coin jar at a time. The average jar yields $58 in purchasing power.
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Most of us have no idea how much our coins are worth. Thus, a trip to a coin exchange kiosk (or bank, or credit union) may yield a pleasant surprise.
“People almost cut the price of their jar in half,” Macauley said, speaking to USA Today earlier this year. “It’s a very pleasant experience. People have this feeling of finding money.”
Some groups of Americans — low-income households, and those over age 55 — still use plenty of cash, the Fed found, along with people who prefer to shop in person.
For the rest of us, McCauley thinks it’s time for a paradigm shift. Don’t think of your coins as clutter. Think of them as recyclable.
“They’re metal,” he said, in case we needed a reminder. “And they have a long and useful life.”
According to CoinNews Journal, the Treasury still issues more than 5 billion coins a year, although that number is declining.
“They’re just natural resources that come out of the earth,” Macauley said: copper-plated zinc for pennies, nickels, copper-nickel alloys for 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 mint so many new ones.
Yes, Macaulay has a vested interest. His company collects a small cut of coins deposited by consumers.
“You can go to your own bank or credit union and not pay any fees,” said Kimberly Palmer, personal finance expert at NerdWallet. NerdWallet and Bankrate both offer tip sheets for exchanging coins for cash. Most banks will accept the account holder’s coins for free, Bankrate reports, but not all, and you may need to roll the coins yourself.
McCauley noted that Coinstar typically waives its fee if a depositor chooses to trade in coins for a retail gift card instead of cash.
He’s not alone in predicting the future for pennies, nickels, and their more profitable relatives.
“We’ve been slower than parts of Europe and Asia to adopt mobile payments and contactless credit cards,” said Ted Rossman, senior industry analyst at Bankrate.
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The pandemic delivered a timely reminder of how much we still rely on cash: Consumers and business owners sat on their coins amid the global shutdown, leading to a real coin shortage.
“It froze the whole system,” Rossman said.
As it turns out, penny nixing creates new problems. As America gets rid of money, the New York Times reports, the nation will soon find itself awash in nickels.
The government loses about three cents on every penny. To a nickel, it loses about nine cents. More nickels would mean steeper losses.
America can kill both the dime and the nickel, losing money on the coin roster.
But without pennies or nickels, how will consumers pay the 15-cent tab?
You can round each value to the nearest 10 cents. But what about the quarter?
And so on.
Do you have a million dollars worth of old money? Experts say that the possibility is very low.
You may have seen one of the many headlines about precious pennies in circulation. “Lincoln Wheat Penny $124M You Can Get Home,” reads one. But the reality is, a lot of money is worth a cent, or possibly a little more.
Reality doesn’t live up to the hype, says an expert.
“There are million dollar pennies, but there are no $100 million pennies,” said Don Perlman, spokesman for the Professional Numismatists Guild (PNG), a nonprofit organization made up of the nation’s most rare coin experts. “Only a few Lincoln cents from 1909 to 1958 with the reverse (“wheat penny”) design have sold for $1 million or more.”
The most valuable US coin of all time, a $20 gold piece, the 1933 “Double Eagle” coin, sold at auction in 2021 for $18.9 million. The most valuable pennies, which are rare but probably still in circulation, were produced in the form of the 1943 copper Lincoln wheat, which was one of the few pennies in the US. The zinc was thought to be used to save copper for the World War II effort, said John Feigenbaum, publisher of the rare coin price guide Graysheet.
In rare cases, some 1943 pennies have sold for $1 million, while one went for more than $200,000 at auction in 2019.
Depending on their condition, those 1943 Lincoln wheat pennies will be worth, at most, between $100,000 and $250,000, Feigenbaum said.
But the possibility of an almost priceless penny is “like saying your lottery ticket could be worth $100,000. Of course, anything is possible, right? But not likely,” said Feigenbaum, also executive director of PNG.
The so-called “wheat penny” takes its name from the reverse of the coin with a stalk of wheat surrounding the text “one cent”. They were produced from 1909 to 1958. Then, the wheat stalks were cut and the pennies began to display the engraving of the Lincoln Memorial.
Most Lincoln wheat pennies are not super-valuable and are worth a few cents rather than a cent. However, some can rise to hundreds of dollars, depending on condition and when minted. Certain vintages, especially those with minting errors, can be worth thousands. You can view the NGC Price Guide here.
But headlines about the over-priced “Lincoln Wheat Penny” stretch the imagination. Most likely, the headlines are created by artificial intelligence to drive traffic to the website, Feigenbaum said.
“These coins are impossible for people to change,” he said.
Still, all the online-fueled interest has resulted in “coin shops being inundated with these people who believe they have something rare, but they don’t,” Feigenbaum said.
The growing interest in coins has led to more valuable coins being sold on eBay and Etsy. Fake Lincoln wheat made in China is being hawked.
“If I see these coins … somebody is taking advantage over and over again,” Feigenbaum said.
Although the most valuable coins are usually in collections and many are publicly “sold and resold,” Feigenbaum said, sometimes people can buy well-preserved coins at caches or estate sales. Some tips:
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Read on your coin. While there are apps you can use to check your coins, they aren’t always accurate. But you can check the coin’s value 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 about collecting Lincoln cents, what can I expect to pay?’ said Feigenbaum, one of the book’s editors. “You’ll see million dollar cents in that book.”
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Go to get your coin grade. From several services, including CAC, the Numismatic Guaranty Company, and the Professional Coin Grading Service, you can get your coins certified for their value, such as jewelry.
This article originally appeared in USA TODAY: Money going away, how to know if you have value
