Philadelphia is retiring their transit tokens. I urge people to go and buy as many tokens as you can. They will be worth the investment 20 years from now. How? Let’s use Chicago as an example.
In 1999 Chicago phased out their transit coins. At the time, fares cost $1.00. Now the CTA tokens are selling for $4 each on eBay.
From one dollar to four dollars. Quadruple in value is great! However, 18 years is a long time, right? But when you look at the yield rate over the 18 years, it’s pretty nice. Factor in the annual compound interest for 18 years, and that’s a 8.0060% yield rate!
Philadelphia, save up those token coins!
(photo of SEPTA transit token provided by ryangs via Creative Commons license. Thank you!)
A couple things I did not factor into the 8% yield:
1) Cost of shipping. Yes, the tokens are selling for $4.00 on eBay, but that’s with free shipping.
2) Cost of time. You’ll have to sell each token individually. That means time managing your eBay account and manually shipping each token. Yipes!
Eight percent was the return people expected from their investments. Bloomberg wrote an article debunking this myth: https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2017-06-23/stop-fooling-yourself-about-8-percent-easy-returns