Save Your Pennies

I can remember a time when I was driving my father's Ford pickup truck home from work. I had a job at Best's Doughnuts. The owner, Herb Best, didn't care if '˜Best's' was difficult to say and confusing. And he was not about to intentionally misspell 'doughnuts' as '˜donuts'. Anyway, I parked my dad's truck in the driveway moments before he had to leave for work and it never even occurred to me to put some gas in his truck. That's because gas didn't really cost very much back then. Also, I was a selfish twerp. My dad never said much about it though, as long as I kept bringing home the 2-day-old doughnuts.

Gas was cheap then. I wish now that I had filled up the whole back of the truck bed with gas and parked it somewhere. I could sure use that cheap gas today.

Don't worry, I would never have really done that. I am not a fool. I know storing gas in an open container such as a Ford Ranger truck bed is dangerous since gas back then had lead in it, and lead has been implicated in some learning disabilities.

Another reason I would not have filled up the truck bed with gas was that, even though gas was cheap, I still barely had enough money to buy a single gallon. Most of my minimum wage from the doughnut shop went toward buying clearasil.

Maybe gas prices will go even higher and we will someday wish we invested in a big tank of gas at today's price. But recently I have heard of a safer substance to hoard. Scrap metals.

Many objects are made out of scrap metals and a recycle center will give you money for them. One example is tin cans, which are made out of aluminum now. We have been just handing them over to the trash man as though he was doing us a favor by taking them. All along we should have been melting them down to store in precious metal piles.

Even some coins are worth money now. Not the so-called '˜golden' dollars they made a few years ago. I would not give you a nickel for one of those. Pennies on the other hand look pretty good lately. Not the new ones, which are made of plastic and spray-painted a copper color. No, but pennies made before 1982 are made out of actual copper. Copper is not just a nice skin tone. It is also an element. There are only 115 elements in the known universe, so if you find one it is like gold. People are cashing in not only their copper pipes and copper wires, but also their neighbor's copper pipes and wires too.

Pennies are even easier to get. They are often just lying in the street. Free ones are in bowels by cash registers. I never claimed to be good at math but if you can get something for free and then sell it for two cents that seems like pretty good business to me. I am saving up my pennies to buy donuts and Clearasil.