Believe it or not some people collect pre-1982 pennies and any date nickels. Why? Well they both contain a significant amount of copper. A pre-1982 penny is about 95% copper and a nickel (any date) is 75% copper. A pre-1982 penny has about 2 cents of copper in it and a nickel has about 4 cents of copper in it. Significantly, it was only a few years ago that the copper price spiked and a nickel had nearly 8 cents worth of copper in it.
The basic idea behind this is that you store the coins until a later time when you hope the value of metal has gone up and you can make money on them by selling them for their metal content. It has already happened with the quarters and dimes minted before 1964. They are 90% silver and are already being sold for twelve times their face value.
One thing is for certain, if you store $100 worth of nickels now you will have at least $100 when you want to cash it in later. If you had put that $100 in a bank and not touched it you would only have got about 1% interest on it which works out to be about $10 after 10 years.
Hoarding nickels and pennies is easy to do, every night grab the change from your pocket and put all of the nickels into a box. Look at each penny and put the 1981 and earlier ones into another box. If you want to go to the limit you will have to do a "bounce test" on any 1982 pennies to see if they are copper or not. The pennies that are copper make a high pitched ring when bounced on a solid surface, the zinc ones make a clunk.
When you retire you are going to find yourself with either a lot of change worth its face value or a lot of metal worth more than its face value. Either way you will end up with a bunch of money.
