Notwithstanding the illegal aspects of it, is it profitable to melt down pennies for metal? According to this recent article it still costs more than a penny to make a penny, with the same true for nickels.
Around 2010 or so a Nickel was worth close to 6 cents. I don’t think melting them down for profit would’ve been scalable. You could freeroll them (sock away $1M worth, hope the metal price goes up, if it doesn’t you still have the cash value), but I don’t think that’s efficient either due to the combination of inflation, the relative unlikelihood of big returns on the metal value, and the expenses around acquiring, transporting, and storing/securing the coins.
That’s only the newer pennies apparently, is it easy to get old pennies? You might chainload a huge bunch of pennies with a penny sorting machine and that might be worth it at a large enough scale.
Notwithstanding the illegal aspects of it, is it profitable to melt down pennies for metal? According to this recent article it still costs more than a penny to make a penny, with the same true for nickels.
A penny is worth a bit over half a cent. http://www.coinflation.com
Around 2010 or so a Nickel was worth close to 6 cents. I don’t think melting them down for profit would’ve been scalable. You could freeroll them (sock away $1M worth, hope the metal price goes up, if it doesn’t you still have the cash value), but I don’t think that’s efficient either due to the combination of inflation, the relative unlikelihood of big returns on the metal value, and the expenses around acquiring, transporting, and storing/securing the coins.
That’s only the newer pennies apparently, is it easy to get old pennies? You might chainload a huge bunch of pennies with a penny sorting machine and that might be worth it at a large enough scale.
In your profit calculation, you also need to consider the cost of the energy used in melting the coins.