Milford Man Pays Off Mortgage With 800 Pounds Of Pennies
BOSTON (CBS) – He says it became an obsession, but a 35-year-old dream became a reality for a Milford man as he paid off his mortgage with pennies.
“It started out as a joke,” says Thomas Daigle. “I said I’m going to pay the last mortgage payment off on this place in pennies.”800 pounds of pennies translates into roughly $1,400 (approximately 180 pennies to a pound, for those who are curious). If he had paid every mortgage payment in pennies, he would have needed 144 tons of pennies to make each payment. That's a lot of pennies! There's talk in the comments about whether he'd have been better off selling the pennies for scrap metal - apparently, pennies minted before 1983 had a lot more copper in them, so are actually worth over $0.03 each!
And the useless MArooned fact of the day: a one gallon wine bottle will hold $55 worth of pennies - yes, I've done this, so I know...
That is all.
4 comments:
$55? By your first anniversary, you and your wife must've been pretty tired.
Ba-dum, cshshsh!
They'll probably SUE him for 'cash money'... and refuse the pennies...
The Boston Globe reports that it was 62,000 pennies, or $620, to pay off a mortgage on a home purchased in 1977. Since that is 35 years ago, I would imagine that some refinancing has taken place in the meantime. At the tail end of a mortgage, you are paying mostly principal and very little interest, so the income tax deduction for interest paid is relatively small. Given that banks have paid very little interest on savings deposits in the past few years, then he should have paid off that mortgage a little earlier than this.
It's illegal to melt down pennies for the copper. Pre '82 models are mostly copper and worth depending on copper prices, 2.5 cents. In 1982 the composition was changed to mostly zinc with copper plating...but it was midway through the year so you have a chance at your penny being either or.
Nickels are also mostly copper. Both coins have people wanting to devalue the base...since they're worth more than face value.
Check coinflation.com for current values of coinage besides just these two. No, they don't pay me, but through a bunny trail of links, that's how I found your site.
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