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Is it viable to buys bags and find silver in the wild? I have to figure most halves were pull out of circulation the last time silver was high. 5 years ago I used to be able to find maybe 3 war nickels per box. Not sure if it's possible to find dimes.

Not much left. My last 16 boxes of dimes(40,000 dimes) yielded 2 silver dimes....not so good but it was better last year. So lets see, today I pick up 2 boxes of halves and my 4 boxes of dimes come in on Thursday. I will let ya know what I find.

Not many places that haven't been tapped out, but I've told a real story about a cousin in law who is a RC member who started looking for halves and hit on a silver mine in his particular area. Apparently it was enough secluded that for whatever reason it hadn't been mined. He pulled hundreds of silver halves from that area before it started to thin out. So its always worth a try. I told him it was of no use but he proved me wrong. In my area of course, it has been tapped out years ago, by people that started well before I ever tried.

I'd say that even with the slim pickings out there, it is still easier to find halves than dimes at this point. And I would imagine that quarters would be MUCH HARDER to find than either halves or dimes. I spent a couple weeks in November driving an area up to about 40 miles from my house and going to some pretty obscure out-of-the-way banks. There is no way I could honestly say the effort was worth it (or even close to being worth it) when you consider the time and gas expense. I spent several hours a day for about two weeks and netted perhaps $40-50 of silver- not $40-50 face, but a total value of $40-50. So much for minimum wage. That sucks!

Yet, that said, there is always that thought in the back of my mind that some heir of an estate who isn't a coin collector could be dumping off coins somewhere near me. I figure that there will be lots of coin collectors who die in the next 10-15 years. And that keeps me going.

If you are doing it for just the recreation value, go for it, you may find some and possibly someone's dumped collection. But if you are in it to make more than a few bucks an hr at best, then just get a part time job at home depot and buy it.

I stopped in 11, the returns were not worth it even a $40.00 + silver.

If you can buy bags off the counting machines, I think it is probably still worth it. I can no longer buy any bags from counting machines in my area, but the very last bag I was able to buy, as the manager told me this would be the last time, yielded over $100 face value of dimes, many of them mercury; that was about 10 months ago. I was routinely getting 2 dimes per bag, with about 1 such windfall per year. Halfs yielded a similar 2-6 per bag, but I hadnt seen a windfall half bag for several years. If I could still buy bags from counting machines, I would buy both dimes and halfs.

Many will say the time spent would be better working an odd, or part time job, then buying the silver (which is what I do). One tip: Wait for a recession, funny things can and will happen, like large hoards of coinage coming into the counters. I've seen it, i.e. 4 - 5 gallon buckets full sitting at the credit union/bank. But, I sort pennies, their is almost zero value in that, it's just a hobby, so if you enjoy doing it and can get access to the coinage go for it. For a few years I was doing $1000 a week in halves, bit of work hauling all that around but I had fun doing it, my biggest finds were always the 40% halves.