My two cents: Potential penny payout puts poor person in pickle
A five dollar bill doesn’t buy what it used to, but it still feels inexplicably good when you find one in the pocket of a recently laundered shirt. So imagine how wickedly delightful it must feel to find $10,000 in the crawl space of a deceased relative’s home.
Not so fast.
In Los Angeles, this ten grand — discovered by family members who were cleaning the now-vacant home — came in the form of pennies, spilling out of dozens of boxes and bags. An estimated 1 million of them all told.
“John Reyes, 41, and his cousin were cleaning out a crawl space in the basement of his late father-in-law’s house when they discovered the pennies,” The New York Times wrote. “The task that Mr. Reyes had been putting off immediately became a much bigger chore, physically and logistically.”
And, I would argue, psychologically. We’ve all cleaned out family homes, and early on you start to save anything that may have some small value, and that lasts about as long as it takes to get to the second cabinet of your dad’s vintage Frisbee collection, at which point something inside you changes, hardens, and from that point on everything goes in the dumpster, financial or sentimental value be damned.
But you can’t do that with legal tender. For one thing it’s probably against the law, and for another, it’s — it’s money. Even if you find 17 pennies in a drawer, and even if you know that they will be a constant irritant that you cannot get rid of them in any efficient manner, and that they will be with you until you die, you can’t just throw them away.
There is also a cut-off point in your life at which you can no longer take a Mason jar of change to the bank. Because you have to stand there as the change-counter clatters and clangs away like a passing freight train, and other customers look at you and shake their heads, wondering how you could have fallen so far.
But $10,000 worth, that’s different. You have to, as they say, back up the truck and take them to a bank or even a commercial change counter despite the hefty percentage they take off the top.
Not so fast.
Because, the Times wrote, “a manager at a local Wells Fargo altered his course, Mr. Reyes said. She urged him not to try to bring the pennies to a bank, telling him: ‘You might have a million-dollar penny.’”
There are certain copper pennies accidentally produced during World War II, when copper was to be saved for the war effort, and pennies for circulation were made of steel. These copper pennies are worth up to $200,000, and given the time period in which the pennies were collected, there’s at least a puncher's chance that somewhere in those bags and boxes of thousands and thousands or pennies, a coin of fantastic value rests.
So what do you do now? Reyes started to go through the pennies individually, but found the job to be a ridiculous time sink with no guarantee of payoff. Still, you don’t want to cash in the lot and then a week later read a headline about some grinning barrel picker who discovered a $200,000 penny in the change he got back from buying dish detergent at Dollar General.
Reyes did what I think is the smart thing: He offered the lot for $25,000, which would put the pennies and the risk with someone else — while maintaining a bit of a hedge against the possibility that they might be worth appreciably more than face value.
He’s received about 300 counter offers, none of which are ideal.
Never has $10,000 been such a headache, and if it were me, I’d leave them in the crawl space where they would convey with the sale of the home. At least that’s my two cents.
Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: One of a million found pennies could be worth $200K; what to do?
