Here’s one for all the penny pinchers out there. And I mean literal penny pinching. Well, not literally in the sense that you actually pinch the penny, but the metaphorical pinching in this instance must be applied to pennies. Not nickels, dimes, dollars, schillings, yen, euros, rupees, or any other form of currency. You will only be beneficial if the money you hold onto is pennies.

Perhaps Mr. Krabs was not so crazy after all when he went running after that penny Plankton rolled out the Krusty Krab door when he was in the Robot Krabs. As it turns out pennies may actually be quite valuable.  The times they are a changin’, and as a result, the price of copper is increasing significantly. If the laws change significantly enough, pennies made from before 1982, which contain more copper than those made afterward, could become quite valuable.

What was once a coin worth one cent could be worth about twenty-four cents. That means of you have a dollar worth of pennies, you would suddenly have a little over twenty dollars worth of pennies. A nice few extra bucks, but nothing really significant.

However, if you’re a real hoarder and manage to get your hands, on, say five hundred dollars worth of pre-1982 pennies, you would end up with about twenty times five hundred dollars. Which would get you… I don’t know, I can’t do math, but it’s some good money.

While penny hoarding probably isn’t a sustainable career for your whole life, there definitely is some money to be made in the business; so if you’ve got some pennies sitting around, it could be a good idea to see when they were made. One cent may be a bit more than just one cent.