Tip of the Week: Two Easy Ways to Find Circulated Silver Coins (2024)

Today’s tip of the week addresses two easy ways to find circulated silver coins in general circulation. In one of our previous tips of the week, we addressed how to tell if your coins are silver. If you haven’t already read this article, or don’t know how to tell if your U.S. dimes, quarters, and half dollars are silver, we recommend that you read the article above.

While it’s important to know how to tell if your coins are silver, once you’ve gone through your coins at home and your change, if you’re like most folks, you’re probably interested in expanding your search. The best place to look for silver coins are at banks, in the form of rolls of coins. Rolls of coins can oftentimes contain pre 1965 90% silver coinage, but going through them can be quite time consuming, so we would like to share with you two strategies that will help to save you time.

Weighing Silver vs. Clad Coins

First, weigh several rolls of coins that don’t contain 90%coins to establish a baseline. Once you feel comfortable with the weight of clad dimes, quarters, and half dollars (those that contain nickel and copper), you can then proceed to weigh other unsearched rolls to determine if the weight differs. If it does, there’s a decent chance that these coins contain silver coins, and are probably worth searching.

Since the weight of rolls of coins can differ slightly, even if they contain clad coins consisting of nickel and copper (primarily due to the thickness of the coin paper rolls), simply weighing the coins isn’t a fool proof method of determining if the rolls contain silver coins.

Look for the Silver Rim

A more accurate approach to take is to take a straight edge and slice a line down the length of the coin roll. Carefully open the area that has been cut and peek in to seek if you’re able to identify any coins with a solid silver stripe. If so, remove these coins from the roll and replace with non-silver coins. Once you do, take a strip of scotch tape to reseal the tube.

Using the above approach will save you a substantial amount of time over removing all of the coins from the coin rolls and resealing them. It can also be quite profitable… especially in more rural areas, where individuals may not be as familiar with 90% silver dimes, quarters, and half dollars, and how to identify them.

Look for Hand-Rolled Coins

At the outset of the article, we mentioned that we were going to share two easy ways to find circulatedsilver coins, but we thought we’d throw in a bonus for our readers.

You may have noticed if you’ve requested rolls

of coins from the bank in the past that there are basically three different types, which consist of hand-rolled coins, rolls from coin processors, such as Brink’s or Loomis, and U.S. Mint rolls.

The best opportunity to find silver coins are from hand-rolled coins, as these rolls generally haven’t been searched. Rolls from coin processors also provide an opportunity to find silver coins, but we’ve heard in the past that these companies allow employees to swap out face value coins for silver coins.

While U.S. Mint rolls don’t provide an opportunity to find silver coins, they do occasionally contain mint errors, if this is something that’s of interest to you. For those folks interested in searching for mint errors, we recommend picking up a copy of The Cherry Picker’s Guide.

Summary

We hope that you found this week’s tip of the week helpful and welcome you to contact us with any questions that you might have or with any ideas that you might have for future tip of the week features.

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Good luck, and may you have success in your search for silver coins!