Ah, another poster earns the coveted jlw Pedant badge. Not sure why it isn’t showing up on their profile, though…
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Sorry shaddack, I think we’re talking about different tax codes. My mistake. (And please see my edited post, which changed while you were typing.)
Cheers…
No worries. Quantum physics is easy to understand in comparison with finances. (My quantum-fu is weak, for the record.)
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I practice quantum financing. I have no idea how much money is in my account most of the time. So I usually feel I am both broke, and doing really well at the same time. It’s not until I check my account to measure the actual amount that I discover I am either one way or the other.
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I tiled my kitchen in pennies. It looks great, cost pretty good for the wear rate per square foot, and copper is antimicrobial.
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There is only one pendant. When a pedant so worthy appears, we will crown them. Should an upstart pedant depose the reining champion the badge will move.
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I didn’t say it was gonna be you, but I knew.
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Pennies can actually be well worth saving up.
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The Pedant Pendant. A true honour.
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Although they got rid of the farthing in 1960…1/960 of a GBP
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“I hope he had a 401K”
I hope he had a pension. 401K’s are for suckers. Have a nice time trusting Wall St.
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Not sure how it works in the US, but in the UK you are not required to accept 1p or 2p pieces for any payment over 20p. Source: http://robertleach.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Quick-guide-to-legal-tender3.pdf
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Did you use a sealant? I hear you need a sealant.
Looks like he just brought in buckets of coins. My bank requires them counted in rolls, with account number written on them for precise counting later.
Glad I wasn’t the person behind him in line.
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Christ, what a non-asshole! Feel better? 
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In the USA, contrary to popular belief, that little phrase “legal tender for all debts…” only means that it is legal to use said scrip for transactions (as oppposed to some “Bank of Bob” that you printed in your basement). There is no legal requirement that anyone accept any item, be it a dime or a $20 bill, as payment. Hence stores are within their rights to post signs like “no bills over $20 accepted.”
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I haven’t yet, it doesn’t seem to be wearing the pennies down with just me and the wife.
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I’d like to see someone do the math on the compounding interest he would have made had he put each penny in the bank instead of a jar. Even with my napkin math, depositing even on a monthly basis at an average rate of 5% return his pennies would have added up to about $6,229.28 over 65 years.
Kinda looks like putting pennies in a jar is for chumps now, doesn’t it.
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I think you have it wrong. You can use non legal tender for transactions in the US (in which case it is effectively barter).
Debts can be paid in any legal tender. It is however, important to be specific about what a debt is. If I walk in to the supermarket and try to buy a frozen dinner and s beer, I haven’t incurred a debt, and the store can tell me top piss off if I try to pay in pennies, or tell me that they only accept Susan B. Anthony dollars etc.
If you go to a restaurant, eat a dinner and drink a beer, THEN you have a debt to be paid. If you offer pennies and the restaurant has the option of accepting the legal tender, or eating the cost, with the exception that the type of legal tender accepted was agreed upon beforehand: “Hello, welcome, here is our menu with our prices, no pennies accepted.”
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Yeah, I used to think that too. But these days, after eating up so much else, Wall Street is eating pensions.
Pension funds will fall further and further behind what they need to pay retirees if they do not make the impossibly high returns of 8.5%. The guiding philosophy of pension funds has been that instead of making employers pay enough to cover the pensions they have promised, funds can make money purely financially – by Wall Street sharpies.
The problem is that safe interest rates today are less than 1% for Treasury bonds. Everyithing else – stocks, corporate bonds, and hedge fund derivatives – are much more risky. And when Goldman Sachs, or JPMorgan Chase draw up a derivative for a client, their aim is to make money for themselves, not for the client.
So pension funds have been at the losing end. Most funds would have done better simply to turn their money over to Vanguard in an indexed fund, and saved management fees.
At the state and local levels, pension funds in New Jersey and other states threaten to go the way of Detroit pension funds – to be cut back so that bondholders can be paid.
Many corporate pension funds also are behind, because companies are using their record profits to pay higher dividends and to buy back their stocks to create price gains for speculators.
But the funds most under attack are union pension funds. These are the funds that Congress has gone after. The fight is not merely to scale back pension funds – and avoid the government’s Pension Benefit Guarantee Corp (PBGC) being bailed out – but to break the power of unions to attract members or to defend them.
More:
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