Someone saved spare change for 80 long years — then they cashed them all in for a surprising fortune

People assume that collecting spare change as a hobby can lead to a hefty payout in the long run. But that's not how things worked out for a man in the U.K., who held on to his spare change for 80 long years. While the man was hoping that he had amassed a small fortune, the total calculated by the machine was rather surprising.

The Outcome of Hoarding Change for 80 Years 

The video clip that showed the coins being counted was posted on TikTok by the popular account @UK.Coin.Hunt. In the footage, the unnamed man could be seen sitting in a car with bags full of coins that were supposedly collected over 80 years.

The overlay text on the video reads, "Cashing in 80 years worth of loose change that I've saved." According to The Mirror, coins worth 1 pence, 2 pence, 50 pence, and even £1 (~$1.31) and £2 (~$2.62) were seen in the man's collection.  

The man is then seen driving up to what seems like a coin-counting machine, before emptying the first bag of coins into it. After counting money from the first couple of bags, the machine flashes a total of £420.50 (~$549.84) on the screen. After this, the man unloads more coins into the machine, which displays the final count as £627.50 (~$819).

The amount was not much considering that the coins were collected for 80 years. But, one can assume that the video ended before the man could get all of his change counted.

However, viewers in the comments speculated that the user either made a mistake in typing the years. "Might have typed the text wrong might have meant 18 years or 8 years not eighty," @joeiroside.is.the wrote.

In a similar case, a man from Louisiana saved pennies for 45 years in a row. Otha Anders told local news outlets the News-Star, that it started when he once found a penny on the ground believing that it was a "gift from god."

Thus, he swore to save every penny he got and he even broke up dollar bills to keep as many pennies as he could. He collected tens of thousands of pennies and refused to cash in on them for decades.

During a coin shortage, the government was offering monetary incentives to those who cashed in pennies. However, Anders refrained from cashing in his coins as he was true to his belief. 

By 2015, Anders had collected 15 five-gallon plastic containers full of pennies. He still had no plans to encash, but he was forced to do so as his homeowner's insurance policy stopped covering his pennies.

Anders finally walked into his bank, with the gallons of pennies loaded on a truck. The Origin Bank in Ruston counted the coins for hours and credited a total of $5,136 into his account. This means that Anders had more than half a million pennies with him.

For more such videos, follow @UK.Coin.Hunt on TikTok

This article originally appeared 2 months ago.