Silver halves from the bank

[amadeus]

Anyone else try getting rolls of half dollars (or quarters/dimes) from their local bank and searching for silver?

I just requested rolls of half dollars at my bank, they said they come in boxes of 50x $10 rolls & they'd order them so long as I agreed to "buy" most of them. So far I've gotten $270 worth (27 rolls) and found one 40% 1965 half and a 1955 Franklin half... 2 out of 540 coins. Quite frankly the Franklin half came as a surprise, I wasn't even expecting to find something like that, no less a key date such as 1955. Only two coins but considering they only cost me $1 quite a fairly decent return.

Has anyone else tried this and if so what's your success rate?

[clr8ter]

Yes, I looked at $600 worth of halves. Found 1 franklin, 5 90% Kennedys, and 16 40%. All from the same bank, also same box, I think. Someone must have turned in a bunch for some reason, when the bank ordered more halves, it dried up.

[amadeus]

I've now gone through a full $500 worth of halves and in all the additional rolls I searched on top of the ones mentioned above I haven't found a single thing

Your luck astounds me, clr8ter.

I hope the next $500 proves more fruitful...

Anyone else have experiences with this?

[JesterJay]

I only find silver coins when I pay for them.
JesterJay

I've now gone through a full $500 worth of halves and in all the additional rolls I searched on top of the ones mentioned above I haven't found a single thing

Your luck astounds me, clr8ter.

I hope the next $500 proves more fruitful...

Anyone else have experiences with this?

[clr8ter]

My luck astounds me, too. Last summer I had read several E-Bay guides that mentioned looking at bank rolls for silver. I was skeptical, but it costs nothing to do. So, when I started finding stuff, I was surprised. Like I said, someone somewhere must have turned in a bunch of silver to the wrong place or something. One of the rolls I got, I looked at the end of the roll at the bank and saw it was silver! Real nice Kennedy 90%. It is nicely toned on the back and probably about AU. Yes, my luck tends to go in cycles........

[Trevallion]

Something I like to do is every time I go into a convenience store or grocery store or any place of business that has a cash drawer, I ask them if they have any half-dollars. Most of the time it's no, but sometimes they have 1 or 2 or 3 in the drawer. They don't care, so they just give me that as change. Sometimes I'm lucky and get 90% ones, but most of the time it's just 40%ers, but I'm not paying anything extra for 'em. I've seen people sitting there at the counter going through the stores' dimes and quarters looking for pre-1964 coins. Usually I don't have time to do that, but it's a good idea.

[DaveK]

I figured I'd give this a try. Went through $20 in dimes and $20 in halves. Nothing interesting, aside from some kind of nasty goop that got rolled up with the dimes

A couple of '66 dimes were the earliest. A nice '99 half and three bi-cen halves that the kids thought were neat.

I put all the coins back into the bank rolls (swapped out the $2 in halves that the kids took off with with some I had laying around) and found that if you're careful you can tuck those machine-rolled edges back in to look pristine. I think I'll see if I can shuttle all the halves from one branch to another and see if there is anything interesting in them. I figure I can put a UV mark on the roll so if it shows up again I won't have to check it.

[SilverWhore]

All of the banks around my area seem to always be annoyed when I ask to buy rolls of coins. If I kept going back and forth I can only imagine the attitude. Is it normal to "order" a whole box of coins from a bank rather than asking to take what they have? When I ask just to buy they sometimes say they can't trade that many rolls because they need them for business orders...

[amadeus]

All of the banks around my area seem to always be annoyed when I ask to buy rolls of coins. If I kept going back and forth I can only imagine the attitude. Is it normal to "order" a whole box of coins from a bank rather than asking to take what they have? When I ask just to buy they sometimes say they can't trade that many rolls because they need them for business orders...

It's something best done at a bank you use regularly and kinda know one or two of the tellers... I'm in the bank I get my half dollar rolls from nearly every day Mon-Fri getting rolls of coins and $1 bills as change for my work so I know all the tellers pretty well, plus I have a personal account at that bank too. Overall I'm on very good terms with them so they don't mind doing me a favor and ordering a whole box of 50 half dollar rolls because they know I'll "buy" all of them, not leave them with rolls of half dollars they don't want.

They ordered me another $500 box of half dollars last week after completely I went through the first one, should be in tomorrow, wish me luck!

Now the other bank I use to cash the half dollars back in, well I'm not sure they like me as much

I probably wouldn't bother going through rolls of dimes or quarters as I'm sure those get snatched out of circulation much faster since they circulate much more as opposed to half dollars...and even sticking with halves I'm not having astounding luck finding silver to begin with.

If anyone likes '76 halves I find TONS of them in the rolls I've been going through, I'm almost wondering if it would be worthwhile to put together rolls of just '76 halves and drop them on eBay?

[DaveK]

So far they've been happy to sell me rolls. They ask if I have an account, but they don't usually ask me to prove it.

I haven't started bringing many rolls back yet though, we'll see how they feel about that.