Donald Trump tells the Treasury to stop making penny
President Donald Trump has told the Treasury Department to stop making pennies, citing production costs.
- Americans hold an estimated $60-90 per household coin.
- The rare penny is valuable, but most are only worth a few cents.
- Consumers can exchange cash for coins at banks, credit unions, or Coinstar Kiosks.
- Americans hold a significant amount of unused coins, averageing between $60 and $90 per household.
- Some unusual pennies are worth a fair amount, but despite misleading online headlines, most pennies in the circulation aren’t very worth it.
- Consumers can determine the value of a coin by having them specialize in scoring the coin using reputable guides such as “The Red Book.”
Learn to love your coins.
This is a message from Kevin McColly, CEO of Coinstar, the company behind the coin chushing machines found in supermarkets.
According to the Federal Reserve, American consumers were only able to make 16% of their payments in cash in 2023. A 2022 Pew survey found that two-fifths of consumers don’t use cash at all.
President Donald Trump ordered the Treasury to stop building penny because production costs exceed its value. (Interestingly, the same applies to nickel.)
Many Americans view both nickel and penny as more annoying than currency. According to the Federal Reserve, typical households sit with $60 to $90 in neglected coins. Americans throw away millions of dollars of coins each year and treat them like garbage.
Why treat coins like garbage? McColey believes we should change our way of thinking about coins.
To state the obvious, the coin is worth the money. Coinstar converts $3 billion in coins into easy-to-use cash each year. One coin jar at a time. The average bottle gives you $58 in purchasing power.
Most of us don’t understand how much our coins are worth. So a trip to a coin exchange kiosk (or a bank, or a credit union) can bring a pleasant surprise.
“People underestimate the value of bottles about half,” McColley said. “It’s a wonderful and enjoyable experience. People have this sense of money they found.”
Certain groups of Americans (low-income households, and those over 55) still use a lot of cash, the Fed discovered, along with people who prefer to shop in person.
Coins are not messy, they are currency
For the rest of us, we think McCollie is a time for a paradigm shift. Don’t consider your coins messy. Think of them as recyclable.
“They’re metal,” he said. “And they have a long service life.”
The Treasury still covers more than 5 billion coins a year, but numbers are falling, according to Journal Coinnews.
“These are natural resources coming out of the planet,” McCollie said: penny copper-plated zinc, nickel, dime, and a quarter copper-nickel alloy.
His point: If Americans get serious about collecting idol coins and “recycled” them into the financial system, Mint doesn’t have to make so many new things.
Certainly, McColly has a vested interest. His company collects small cuts of coins that consumers deposit.
“You can go to your own bank or credit union and you can’t pay the fee,” said Kimberly Palmer, a personal finance expert at Nerdwallet. Both Nerdwallet and Bankrate offer tip sheets when exchanging coins for cash. Most banks are not everything, but not everything.
“A lot of people probably have hidden coins hidden around their homes, and they may have time to gather them together,” Palmer said.
McColly points out that if a depositor chooses to trade coins on retail gift cards rather than cash, Coinstar generally gives up the fee.
He is not alone in predicting the future of Penny, Nickel and their more profitable relatives.
“We were able to adopt mobile payments and contactless credit cards much slower than parts of Europe and Asia,” said Ted Rothman, senior industry analyst at Bankrates.
The pandemic has reminded us in a timely manner the amount we still rely on cash. Consumers and business owners sat on coins amid the global closure and seeded the actual coin shortage.
“We’ve frozen the entire system,” Rothman said.
Resignation Coin: Where will it end?
Trump only instructed Mint to stop making pennies, but some voices have urged America to stop using them.
The Common Cents Act, introduced by a bipartisan group of lawmakers on April 30, will close the cash transaction at the nearest five cents.
“Penny is outdated and inefficient and no longer meets the needs of our economy,” said Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat.
However, the bill was able to push the country down onto a slippery slope.
“So you want to get rid of the penny,” the New York Times meditated in a recent headline. “Do you have any plans for nickel?”
After all, removing the penny creates a new problem. As America removes the penny, the Times reported, the country will soon find its overflowing with nickel.
The government loses nearly three cents each time it is minted. In nickel, you lose almost nine cents. An increase in nickel means sudden losses.
America was able to kill both Penny and Nickel, two Money Roses on the Coin roster.
But without penny or nickel, how would consumers pay a 15-cent tab?
You can round any price to the nearest ten cents, taking your general cents a step further. But what happens to the quarter after that?
and so on.
Do you own an old penny worth a million dollars?
Experts say it’s very unlikely.
You may have seen one of the many headlines recently exploded online.
According to one expert, reality doesn’t meet the hype.
“We have a million dollar pennies, but not a million dollar pennies,” said Don Perlman, a spokesman for the Professional Monetist Guild (PNG), a nonprofit organization made up of experts in many rare coins in the country. “From 1909 to 1958, Lincolncent sold wheat stem designs (“wheat penny”) for over $1 million. ”
The most valuable US coin, a $20 gold piece, and the 1933 “Double Eagle” coin sold at auction in 2021 for $18.9 million. The rare coin price guide from Greysheet.
In rare cases, the approximately 1943 penny is on sale for $1 million, but it won over $200,000 at the 2019 auction.
Depending on their condition, the 1943 Lincoln wheat penny is worth up to $100,000 to $250,000, Faigenbaum told USA Today.
But the chances of having a penny without a price are similar to saying, “I might say that a lottery ticket is worth $100,000. Of course, anything is possible, right?
What is the value of a wheat penny?
The so-called “wheat penny” gets its name from the back of a coin with a wheat stem surrounding the text “one cent.” They were produced from 1909 to 1958. The wheat stems were then removed and Penny began displaying sculptures at the Lincoln Memorial.
Most Lincoln wheat pennies are extremely unworthy and worth more than just a few cents. However, depending on the condition, some people escalate to hundreds of dollars when built. It may be worth thousands of certain vintages, especially for mint errors. Click here for the NGC price guide.
But the very valuable headline about “Lincoln Wheat Penny” stretches your imagination. Perhaps the headlines are created by artificial intelligence to drive traffic to the website, Feigenbaum said.
“These coins are probably in the change of people,” he said.
Still, the interest that stimulated all online is “inundated with these people who believe that coin shops are rare, but not,” according to Feigenbaum, which results in
With growing interest in coins, in addition to the overvalued coins being sold on eBay and Etsy, there are counterfeit Lincoln wheat pennies made in China.
“If I saw these coins…someone is used sometimes,” Feigenbaum said.
What should I do if I have a penny or other coin I think is worth it?
The most valuable coins are usually in collections and are very publicly “sold and resold”, but according to Feigenbaum, people sometimes inherit cash of well-stored coins or buy them through real estate sales.
- Read the coin. There are apps you can use to check coins, but they are not always accurate. However, you can check the value of the coins in “2026 Red Book: A Guide Book of United States Coins.” Available online at BookStores at Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble. “Answer all sorts of questions like, ‘Oh, if you’re thinking about collecting Lincolncent, what do you think you can pay?’ ” said Fagenbaum, one of the book’s editors. “You can see that the book doesn’t have a million dollar cents.”
- Let me score the coins. You can authenticate coins at their value, just like jewelry, from several services, including CAC, monetary guarantee companies and professional coin grading services.
Mike Snyder is a reporter for the trending team at USA Today. You can follow him in the thread, send BlueSky, X with X and send him an email Bliss & @mikegsnider.bsky.social & @mikesnider &msnider@usatoday.com
