One Million Old Pennies Found In Los Angeles Home: Are They Worth $10,000 Or More — And How To Get Rid Of Them

Chances are you know someone with a change jar in their house, a place to put all the spare change and save it until the jar gets full or for a special event. Oftentimes, people have a penny jar, collecting one-cent coins over years and then cashing them in at the bank.

A Los Angeles home took penny collecting to the extreme as their relatives recently found out.

What Happened: The value of a penny is one cent when using it as legal tender at stores or depositing it at the bank. The value of pennies when factoring in the metals used to make the coin might make the value worth more.

A home built in the 1900s revealed a huge collection of pennies while being cleaned out by relatives.

The home located in Los Angeles had more than one million pennies found in a crawlspace. The discovery was made by realtor John Reyes in the home that belonged to his father-in-law, according to local news outlet KTLA.

Reyes believed the home was once used as a bed and breakfast. His father-in-law Fritz and Fritz’s brother were German immigrants who lived in the home for decades.

After Fritz passed away and his brother moved, Reyes and other family members have been working through the task of cleaning out the home with future plans to renovate it.

“They kept everything,” Reyes told KTLA.

For years, Reyes, his wife and relatives have been working to clean the home. A crawlspace from the basement of the home became the subject of a massive discovery.

“We were trying to do a thorough job.”

In the crawlspace, the relatives found bank bags, boxes and crates, with a massive collection of over a million pennies.

The pennies were pre-1980 and made of copper; since 1982, pennies have been made primarily of copper-plate zinc.

With the task of now cashing in the coins, the relatives had to make a decision on what to do with the massive coin collection. The original thought was to exchange them at Coinstar machines, before realizing they would lose 8% of the value.

Local banks told Reyes it was too large of an amount of coins to bring in to exchange. The pennies were taken out of the house bag by bag and into several trucks, an effort that took multiple hours.

“It took a whole day just to get them out of the crawlspace.”

As their local Canadian bank also didn’t want to take the pennies, Reyes and his family were left with a decision to make again. They decided to look through the collection for any rare pennies.

“You see all these stories of people finding pennies worth $2 million.”

With a value of $10,000 for one million pennies, but the potential of multiple rare coins in the collection, the family decided to list the coins on resale app OfferUp for $25,000.

Several offers have been made on portions of the collection, but not for the entire lot. The family is open to offers, with the news station offering Reyes’ Instagram account as a communication method. Buyers should know they would have to pick up and transport the pennies.

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Why It’s Important: Based on the story from Reyes, his father-in-law Fritz recognized the value of metals and minerals.

With the U.S switching to zinc to use in pennies, Fritz used his paychecks to buy copper pennies to store for future value.

“The value is the uniqueness.”

The story of the pennies found in the home offers many lessons including how saving coins can quickly add up over the years. The value recognition of copper in the old coins can also showcase how items that are out of service or retired can go up in value after they are no longer made.

Likewise, the lesson could be made that the value of something is only as much as someone is willing to pay for it.

The saying goes “Find a penny, pick it up, all day long and you’ll have good luck.” I’m not sure the same can be said for one million pennies.

If you enjoyed this story, check out more from Benzinga Inspire here. 

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