jagvocate said:
I paid my parents' mortgage off when I was ten by trading junk silver (thank you hunt brothers)
This, as a case study in money arbitrage, needs to be taught in business schools
LOL.....I wish it was some brilliant move...but alas just a lot of sweat and some FANTASTIC luck. Here's how it happened:
- Texas was a unitary banking state back then...so not a lot of rolls going from bank to bank. Our town was a suburb and had two large, community banks and one large savings and loan. In the mornings I would ride my bike to one bank and get $100 in rolls of dimes, quarters, and half dollars. I would ride back home and search through the rolls and pull our any 90% and 40% Kennedy's. Usually there might be $1 to $2 face...worth about 3 times face so, I'd make about $4 a search. Sometimes though, you'd get a jackpot. Then in the afternoon, I'd take the re-wrapped rolls to a second bank (after of course replacing the coins taken out) and get cash and then go to the third bank and get new rolls. Then I'd go through those and start the whole process over.
- I saved every coin I took out, but occasionally had to go to the coin shop on weekends and cash in a roll in order to fund the replacement coins. I always sold the 40%.
- So about the time the Hunt brother's tried to corner the silver market, I had accumulated about $500 face value of 90% junk silver. When the price of silver skyrocketed to about $45/ounce...the dealers were only paying 22 times face...as the smelters had huge backlogs of coins waiting to be smelted....and passed that problem along to the dealers.
- Anyway, I sold my stash for about $12,000 and gave the money to my parents to payoff their mortgage. They'd only paid $15,000 for the house about ten years earlier. We were very poor as my dad was on serious disability and my mom had to stay home and take care of him. He died a few years later. But paying off their mortgage was a tremendous gift....they both couldn't hardly believe it.
- Downside though.....that's when everyone started looking through their change for silver coins and the effort to resume my process wasn't worthwhile. While in college, I was a bank teller for a few summers at one of those banks. I'd check every teller's coin tray at least once a day...and you might see two or three 40% half dollars during the week.
- Final note....however, there have been a few times in my life I have heard the ring of 90% silver when a store clerk threw someone's change in the till. I'd ask them to let me look at their quarters or dimes and sure enough would find the 90% piece. When you've sorted through so much change, it's easy to pick the silver out just by its distinctive ring to your ears.
Thanks for indulging me down memory lane.
