Price of Junk Silver Coins
One of the lovely things about old “junk” currency coins is that price of junk silver coins is easy to determine. They have a constant and predictable silver content, by weight and by face value, so it makes them easy to work with.
The face value of a silver half dollar coin is 50 cents. The face value of a silver dime is 10 cents. So, a dime has one fifth (1/5) of the face value that the half dollar has. And the neat thing is that the dime also has exactly 1/5 of the silver content that the half dollar has, also.
Because of this consistency, silver junk coins are often sold by bags per face value, or by weight. For instance, these coins are commonly traded by the “bag”. A standard bag contains a total face value of $1000, regardless of which type of coin(s) it contains. So, a bag might have 10,000 dimes or 4,000 quarters or 2,000 half-dollars, or any combination of silver coins that equals $1000 of face value.
The price of a full bag of junk silver, at the time of this writing (May 2009) is just over $11,150. The spot price of silver today is $14.60. Each dollar of face value contains about 0.72 ounces of pure silver. So the math goes like this: Multiply the price of silver by 0.72, then multuply that product by the number of dollars of face value in the bag.
Our example with today’s spot price, tells us that a $1000 face value bag of junk silver contains about $10,500 of pure silver. ($14.60 x 0.72 x $1000 = $10,512) By then subtracting this value, from the price of the bag mentioned above ($11,150) the premium that will be paid is discovered, which in this case equals about $638.
By then dividing the premium amount by the silver content value ($638 รท $10,512 = 0.061 = 6.1%) we get the premium percentage, which in our example here is 6.1%. This is fairly low, considering that some forms of silver, even bullion, can carry premiums over 30%, especially when sold in low quantities.
So, the price of junk silver coins sold in quantity will commonly carry a relatively small premium.