It’s easy to avoid paying much mind to pennies. You don’t have to be particularly wealthy to see that it’s quite difficult to make a single cent go very far, especially with inflation increasing more and more every year.

And while plenty of people still keep a penny jar in the house, for 45 years, Otha Anders of Louisiana was taking that practice to an entirely different level. After filling up over a dozen five-gallon drums with pennies, he decided it was time to cash in, so he started carting the pennies down to the bank.

It took the bank more than five hours to count Otha’s bounty, but the most amazing part was what they told him when they were done. Otha got some seriously unexpected news about his savings!

It’s not always easy to save money, but one way that some people try to stretch their dollars is by collecting their coins in a piggy bank. Sure, it might not seem like much initially, but eventually, that loose change can really add up!

Even with that knowledge, though, it can be difficult to feel that same way about pennies. After all, not only are they the least valuable form of American currency still being circulated, but with inflation, they’re being used less and less often.

Not only that, but you may have heard that it actually costs more than a penny to make a penny. It may sound crazy, but it’s absolutely true. In fact, the United States lost approximately $55 million in 2013 from producing pennies!

Yet that doesn’t change the fact that if you save enough of just about any form of currency—including pennies—for a long enough period of time throughout your life, you’re eventually going to earn a significant payload!

That’s why, for more than four decades of his life, Otha Anders saved every single penny that he could possibly find. He had to know that they weren’t going to be worth much, but that didn’t stop him from trying to be as thrifty as he could!

One could imagine that Otha, a Louisiana resident, must have been proud of himself for making such an effort to literally save every penny that he could. It certainly had to take a great deal of commitment and restraint!

He saved the pennies in big, five-gallon jugs, and over the years they began to accumulate. As you might expect from something like that, they started to really take up space. It was getting to the point where the amount of coins Otha had was unmanageable!


That must have been why, one day 45 years after he had originally started collecting his pennies, he decided that enough was enough. Otha started carting his pennies over to the bank. It was finally time to cash in… and the whole process took over five hours!


What happened when he made it to the bank, though, blew everyone’s mind. They must have known that with that many pennies, he would have had a hefty payout, but nobody could have predicted exactly how much it would all be worth!

That was quite the payday! After all of those years of literal penny pinching, hopefully Otha was able to enjoy his earnings. He certainly deserved a nice dinner out, a fancy glass of Champagne, or even a luxurious vacation! You won’t believe how much his coin collection was worth in the video below…

That’s about a thousand times better than just finding an old dollar bill in your pocket. We should all start saving our pennies right now!

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