After discovering what they believe to be one million copper pennies in a basement, a couple in California is now betting on the penny to bring home the bacon.
Around nine months ago, John Reyes and his wife were cleaning her late father's Los Angeles home when they came across bags of the coins.
The family debated cashing them in for their face value of $10,000 (£8,000), but ultimately decided against it.
One neighborhood bank informed Mr. Reyes that there was no room in the vault for the coins.
He recalled the Well Fargo branch manager telling him, "'Don't bring them here,'" in an interview with a nearby CBS News affiliate.
He made the discovery while crawling through a crawl space at his father-in-law's house in the Pico-Union neighborhood of Los Angeles.
He claimed that at first, he discovered a lot of loose pennies that had rolled away after the paper rolls that had been holding them in bundles had fallen apart. Later, they discovered bank bags filled to the brim with pennies.
Some of the banks, according to Mr. Reyes, "no longer even exist.".
Mr. Reyes continued, "We literally had to take them bag-by-bag out of the basement, up the stairs, and into the trucks. It took us an entire day to get them out of the house.
The family speculates that the house, which was built in the early 1900s, once served as a bed and breakfast.
The coins, which are made of pure copper, date back to before 1943, when the US started manufacturing the one cent coin using other metals because of World War Two shortages. Zinc is now the main component of pennies.
The couple claimed that the coins made their car so heavy that they had to use the slow lane. Although they haven't counted each one, they can infer from the weight that there are roughly one million in the cache.
The couple reluctantly decided not to cash out the heavy load after speaking with a banker.
Mr. Reyes remarked, "You see all these stories of people finding pennies worth $2 million.
They have chosen to sell them all online for $25,000 instead of personally searching the haul for any valuable rare coins.
According to Mr. Reyes, the funds will be used to renovate the house so that it can be rented out to later generations.
He claims it has given him the impression that his father-in-law is still protecting the family more than ten years after his passing.
