Are wheat pennies worth any money, other than a penny?

Question

My husband collects old coins, and coins he thinks will be worth something one day. His oldest is a 1919 wheat penny. He has many others, but I was just wondering what they were worth. I went to one site that gave prices, but I don't speak business lingo very well and couldn't read the stupid charts. Please Help!

Answer 1

I think they are worth a little more than a penny, but not much more as they made millions of them. I doubt they will be worth much in your lifetime.

Answer 2

Most "wheat cents": pre-1959 Lincoln Cents, with two sprigs of wheat on the reverse (tails) side, are worth about 2 cents each, in bulk lots on eBay.  Sometimes some of these auctions conclude without bids; sometimes bulk lots of what sellers declare - truthfully, one hopes - to be "unsearched" wheat cents sell for more, as buyers might seek to sift through them to try to find scarcer dates.

This is the best, most realistic price guide to the values of US wheat cents I've yet come across, from about.com:

Wheat Penny Values

http://coins.about.com/library/coin_valu...

Those are wholesale values in average circulated condition; coins that are much sharper than the norm will sell for more.  (Most price guides are confusing because they give a large number of prices for each coin, for each of its grades or conditions.  This about.com guide helps simplify things, by giving just a single price for the condition in which most collectors are likely to find these coins.)

The "S" (San Francisco Mint) and "D" (Denver Mint) mintmarks on these coins, if any, appear directly below the dates.  Dates without mintmarks were struck at the main US Mint in Philadelphia.

That same about.com site also gives realistic values for many other series of older US coins:

http://coins.about.com/od/coinvalues/Coi...