A Nickel Saved?

Around where I live (Michigan), we frequently encounter Canadian coins in everyday transactions. Those things are the worst! Once you get them, you can't spent them. You can't take them to the bank, and you can't use them in parking meters, or vending machines. In this way, I have been forced to start a small hoard of Canadian coins.

But with the price of base metal on the rise in recent years, those Canadian coins aren't half bad. Take for instance, the Canadian Five Cent coin. Those that are minted between 1963-1981 are made of 99.9% pure nickel. The official weight of each coin is 4.54 gram.

It takes 100 of those old coins to accumulate 1 pound of nickel. That is, your cost of 1 lb of nickel is only $5 CDN. The current spot price of nickel is about $13 USD a pound. At one point in the past 12 months, nickel actually shot past $23 USD a pound.

But good luck finding those old nickels. You're definitely not the first one to have figured this out.