Family Selling $8,000 In Pennies For $25,000, And It Might Be A Great Deal | Fox Sports Pittsburgh (2024)

You don't have to be too much of a math expert to know that 800,000 pennies equals $8,000, but one family who discovered that many pennies is selling them for $25,000, over three times what they are worth. What's even crazier is that could actually be an amazing deal.

John Reyes and his wife were cleaning out her old family home in Los Angeles when they found the massive collection of 800,000 pennies in a basem*nt crawl space. It turned out that in the 1980s, after the Treasury Department reduced the copper content in pennies, John's late father-in-law stockpiled them thinking that eventually they would be worth more than a penny.

While he wasn't wrong - a regular penny from 1981 or earlier is now valued at up to 3 cents, but if you buy something with it, it is still just worth a penny. However, there is a strong possibility some of the coins in the Reyes' lot could be worth more to collectors, a lot more. According to The Washington Post, the family got inspired to look for those pennies after attempting to unload the hoard. They spent a full day removing it from the basem*nt, then contacted Wells Fargo to see if their local bank could take the coins, but the bank manager explained that there wasn't enough room in their vault. However, once she learned about the size of the collection, the manager suggested the Reyes' look at it a little closer, telling them. "You probably have a million-dollar penny in there."

She could be right - pennies with errors on them can sell anywhere from $1,000 to more than one million dollars. So the Reyes family set off to find one of those valuable coins. It took them an hour to look at just 300 pennies before they gave up and decided to sell them all. John explained, "We had no clue what we were looking for." The good news is, they've already got a potential buyer. No word on how that possible new owner plans to sort through the coins to find any valuable ones.