Check Your Piggy Banks Iowa! You Could Have A $300,000 Coin

You might want to sift through that pile of coins sitting in your car.

Coins in my life live in one of two places: a little console in my car or at the bottom of my purse. A lot of us don't use coins much anymore because we don't use cash anymore. But for whatever reason, we still have plenty of coins hanging around.

This is especially true for pennies. My mom uses pennies often for exact change but I think the highest value coin I've used in recent days is a dime. Pennies cost about 3 cents each to make, which seems like a pretty low ROI for the Mint, but I digress.

But check your car dash, penny rolls, bottom of your purse, or wherever your pennies might be because there could be one that's worth significantly more than 1 cent.

Do You Have The Penny That's Worth Thousands?

The pennies you're looking for are 1943 Steel pennies, which as you could guess, are rare. According to GovMint, the pennies were only made in 1943 because of a copper shortage. In 1944, the Mint started using copper for pennies again but some steel pennies were smacked with the 1944 year and now those are considered valuable because there's not many of them.

The big one that's been proven to be worth bank (it actually even sold for $1 million) is the 1943-S Lincoln cent. It looks like this:

As you're sifting through your pennies with prayers to find one of these, a good thing to do is look for errors or irregularities, like maybe some zinc marks in the crevices. Things that make the pennies different are what can make them valuable.

Or fake, who knows. Have fun searching!