Mr. Rawles,
This is a response to Patrick S. letter concerning Canadian Nickels.
I previously sent a post to you on the topic of sorting Canadian pennies and there was an excellent response related to Canadian nickels.
Since then there has been a development in that the Canadian government has discontinued issuing new pennies.
To this effect, I no longer bother sorting pennies. In the spirit of your recent post concerning the possibility of bank holidays in the US (which I believe will could happen in Canada), I keep every penny I find regardless of if they are debased or not. When my children are a little bit older and the melt value of the non-debased coinage is substantially higher than it is now, I believe I will just have them sort through and use the debased pennies as their allowance money.
Moreover, in the event of a hyperinflation and currency collapse, I suspect even the fully debased Canadian pennies (and even nickels) will actually be a better hedge on inflation than paper bank notes, as the melt value on those coins are between 1/100 and 1/1000th of their face value.
As for sorting Canadian nickels, I’d like to offer some tips I’ve picked up after recently starting. Some of these points may well be valid for your American audience when the US nickel under goes debasement.
The first is whenever you receive small change for a transaction, always ask for it in nickels. When the cashier at a store gives them to you, sort them on the spot, separating the debased nickels from the non-debased ones. It is good to have a coin purse with three sections specifically for this purpose.
Secondly, are some pointers for if you are going to a bank to pick up rolls coinage. For nickels don’t bother sorting rolls that appear machine rolled. These typically contain nickels fresh from the mint that contain nothing but fully debased ones. You can tell the machine rolled ones, because they either are fully sealed plastic rolls, or paper rolls with crimped ends that obviously could not be rolled by hand. Hand rolled nickels usually come in paper roles that are folded at the end or rigid plastic roles that have a pocket or buttons to close it.
When dealing with the banks, don’t arouse suspicion as well by rejecting the rolls at the bank. Take them to a Tim Hortins and buy a coffee and doughnut, or use them as change for other small transactions (garage sales are great for getting large amounts of nickels and pennies), or keep them at home with your cache of currency as the change you will immediately use in an emergency (keeping the non-debased nickels as a generational store of wealth).
Also, try to find out the day of the week that your bank rolls all the coins they have brought in by customers and go on that day to pick up both pennies and nickels. That is the day they are usually swimming in rolls of mixed bag nickels and pennies.
Lastly on the topic of collecting rolls of nickels (or pennies) from the bank, is do your fellow survivalist a favour if you decide to re-roll and return nickels or pennies to the bank. Put a discrete, cryptic little note on them indicating something like “2000+” that anyone with a like minded idea would have. Most bank cashiers I’ve dealt with don’t care and this saves others (and possibly yourself) the trouble of having to go through a roll and come out empty handed.
The last topic, when sorting both Canadian nickels and pennies, don’t bother to sort them by their specific series. We are fortunate in Canada that any nickel before 1999 is not fully debased, with the 1982 to 1999 nickels still having almost a $0.045 melt value. For nickels, if you see “19xx” as the mint year – just keep it. It’s quite easy to identify those nickels as the profile of the Queen on most of those coins is the younger version of her with a certain crown. Also, all debased coins have the Royal Canadian Mint symbol on it, so that is an easy identifiable mark for you to filter those coins out. Again, one day I’ll probably have my kids go through and further sort those coins, and for that reason, it is probably a good idea to print out the coinflation.com/canada or wikipedia pages with the specific years for nickels and pennies.
Once you get into a rhythm, it’s actually pretty easy to identify which coins are debased and which ones are not.
Hope these tips help! God Bless, – Nick L.