Man pays off mortgage with pennies

Thomas Daigle, an optician from Milford, Mass., made his final house payment all in pennies -- more than 62,000 in nice, neat rolls of 50 coins each, stacked in two boxes he hauled to the bank. They weighed more than 800 pounds, by Daigle's estimate.

• Bing: Is it legal to hoard pennies?

Daigle decided to make the final payment with pennies back when he and his wife, Sandra, bought the house 35 years ago. His hometown newspaper, The Milford Daily News, offered these details:

So he began collecting an average of 2.5 pennies per day and placing them into a grape crate. But after a few years, the box began to break due to the overbearing weight. So he bought a pair of steel military rocket launcher ammo boxes to hold the pennies.

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Good thing he let the Milford Federal Savings and Loan Association know of his delivery a month in advance -- and that they supported his plan. Remember the Canadian man who encountered resistance when he paid off his student loan debt with $114,000 in cash?

Daigle isn't the first to use a large number of coins to pay a bill. (Personally, I can't imagine storing so many coins in my home or asking poorly paid bank tellers to do so much extra work.)

For instance, Paul Brant, of Indiana, paid for two vehicles with $36,000 in quarters in 1994, and then bought a new pickup with $26,000 in spare change in 2007. According to this news report, the car dealership had to use an armored car company to pick up and count the coins because no bank wanted to be bothered.

Then there was the Utah man who paid off a disputed $25 medical bill by dumping 2,500 pennies on the counter.

Others have used the penny payment method as a way to settle scores, including Thierry Cahez of San Diego County, who paid a $6,500 credit card bill with 650,000 pennies after his bank turned him down for refinancing.

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Do you have a similar plan? Keep in mind that businesses are well within their rights to refuse huge payments made up solely of coins.

Of course, these penny hoarders may be on to something the rest of us don't know about. Says ABC News: "If the laws change and the (U.S.) mint decides to abolish the penny, people would be free to melt them down for the copper."

More from MSN Money:

• Should America keep the penny?
• Why $1 coins haven't caught on
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• Do renters ruin a neighborhood?
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