Penny Pincher Cashes in His Life Savings: 500 Pounds of Change
Fellow Millennials: What is your current savings plan? Chances are you probably don't have one. Here's a retirement plan you could try: Save every penny you find for the next 65 years; that's what 81-year-old Ira Keys did. Now he has $816 in cold, hard cash.
The Slaton, Texas man just did as his father told him. "(My dad) says, 'Whatever you do son, save your money,'" Keys told KCBD. "Back when I started in '52, I didn't have a lot of money, so I saved pennies and I just kept saving them."
After decades of saving, Slaton drove his penny haul (approximate weight: 500 pounds) over to the local bank, who apparently counted each individual coin by hand.
"You see them on the ground and you're kind of like, 'Oh, I'm not picking that up,' but for him to collect it for years and years was pretty amazing," Kari Lewis, a personal banker at Prosperity Bank, told KCBD. "We ended up with $816 in pennies. Not a typical day at the bank, at all."
And if you think that was all the pennies and change Keys had, you would be wrong, my friend.
"I'm going to build a room divider and have pennies all in it," he told the TV station, "the shiny ones."
