It was the late 1960s when he began to collect pennies. It was not a bid to save money but it was something he did because he liked it. Even when a government program started where you could get $125 for every $100 worth of pennies you turned it, he decided to keep his own collection simply because he liked having it.

When he began his collecting, he saw pennies as an excuse to stop whatever it was he was doing and say a prayer.

“If I would see a penny when I’m gassing up, on the ground, or in a store, it would be a reminder to stop right there and say a prayer,” Anders said in an interview to ABC News. “I never failed to do that. That’s why they had so much value to me.”

One of the rules he had for his collection was to not accept any pennies as a gift from anyone.

“But I never allowed anyone, not even my wife nor children, to give me pennies without being compensated,” he shared. “I wanted the inner satisfaction that God and I acquired this collection.

Over time, the practice of stopping everything to say a prayer when he found a penny became important to Anders. He began to notice a pattern; on days he was not thankful enough for the life he had. A penny would appear before him and remind him of everything he had.

“I became convinced that spotting a lost or dropped penny was an additional God-given incentive reminding me to always be thankful. There have been days where I failed to pray and more often than not, a lost or dropped penny would show up to remind me,” he said.

First he began to fill up five-gallon sized water jugs with the coins he collected. His initial goal was to get to five of those. But once he fulfilled that goal, he simply did not want to stop.

After that, he realized he needed to go to a bank and turn the pennies in. By the time he made it to the bank he had 15 of those 5-gallon bottles filled up with his pennies!

“I wanted to fill five five-gallon water jugs. That was the goal, but I couldn’t stop. … If I hadn’t turned them in yesterday, I was not going to stop,” Anders said.

While his goal to collect pennies was never financial, they did amount to a pretty decent pay day! After he found out his home insurance policy would not cover his 15 jugs of pennies, he called up his bank Origin Bank in Ruston, Louisiana.

He informed them that he would be coming in and making a big deposit. Each of the bottle had to be opened by an ax and the entire process or retrieving the coins and then counting them took about 5 hours. His collection in the end, was valued in the thousands!