Melt Down Your Money
At least the pennies and nickels. Confused? Don’t be.
You’re literally not going to believe this…
Because of the prevailing prices of metals, the cost of producing pennies and nickels exceeds the coins’ face value.
A nickel is 25 percent nickel and 75 percent copper. The metal in one coin costs 6.99 cents for each 5-cent coin.
Modern pennies have 2.5 percent copper content with zinc making up the rest of the coin. The current copper and zinc in a penny are worth 1.12 cents.
Estimates put the amount of pennies in circulation at over 150 billion, worth $1.5 billion as is and $1.68 billion if melted down. That’s a loss of $180 million.
And let’s not forget our friend the nickel, who we lose almost 2 whole cents on. But I’ll still use the 1.99 cents to calculate the loss. Ready? 20 billion nickels in circulation worth $1 billion as is and $1.398 billion if melted down. $398 million lost by printing these things.
So what is the mint doing about this? What else? Making it illegal to melt your money…
U.S. Mint officials said Wednesday they were putting into place rules prohibiting the melting down of 1-cent and 5-cent coins, with a penalty of up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000 for people convicted of violating the rule.
By the way, ABC has more about this from June of this year when the news first broke.
One last question…should we get rid of this coinage once and for all? Or at the very least get rid of the penny?
Ahh…how rich.
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3 Responses to “Melt Down Your Money”
I’m fine with this. You can’t kill the penny without also killing the nickel – that whole base-10 math thing, right?
What else would work? Get the value of US currency back up? Find a cheaper penny? (I’m thinking AOL demo discs.)
Just my two cents.
(Would we have to change that to twenty?)
We can’t evenget rid of the dollar bill despite the fact it is a huge money loser for all of us.
I’ll admit the AOL disc “solution” seems promising. lol
I heard that the mint was also making more dollar coins and possibly phasing out the dollar bill. (I’ll bet that the dollar coins don’t cost a dollar to make.) It would probably be a good idea to just stop making pennies. There would still be plenty around for a while. Or, why don’t they just change their makeup, so that they’re less expensive to make?