I enjoy travelling, and get to do it both for work and fun at times.
I often come back with some extra money, which I put in a drawer just in case…um…something happens and I find a use for it.
I’m based in the US…so when I go to which use the US dollar, I don’t have any “extras”.
Currently in my drawer, in bills, I have:
21 Canadian Dollars (1 twenty, 1 one)
20 Fijian Dollars (1 ten, 5 twos)
92 Chinese Yuan (1 fifty, 3 tens, 2 five, 2 ones)
9 Cayman Dollars (1 five, 4 ones)
And, for some reason, 1 Malaysian Ringgit. I’ve never been to Malaysia, so I’m not sure why I have it.
So…do any of you have random collections of foreign money?
-D/a
I’ve got a small amount of money from every country I have visited. My mother is a school teacher, so requires me to purchase a thousand of the smallest valued coins in every country. Do you have any idea how much it makes the bank clerks go ??? when I want to exchange a 20 dollar bill for 1000 1-yen coins?
No, I am way too nomadic to hold onto something that is useless and is, ultimately, not particularly sentimental to me. Last summer I was cleaning out my apartment and I found some random coins from India and the Philippines and offered them to people on the SDMB, figuring they could be interesting for kids (loved seeing coins from other countries when I was a kid), or be used for making jewelry.
I have pictures and more useful trinkets (jewelry, clothing) from India and the Philippines, that’s good enough for me.
When I was playing tourist a lot overseas in the 80’s I put a little bit of the currency of every country I visited in my photo albums. I mostly stuck to bills, but I do have coins stuck in my albums as well.
I am an American who travels to Canada and Europe a lot. Therefore, I do keep leftovers for my next trip. When with other travelling friends, I often swap money so we don’t have to do it at a bank or use credit cards for small purchases. It evens out.
I don’t keep notes, because I can exchange then when I return home. I keep coins for those currencies I’m likely to re-use in the near future (UK, Euro, New Zealand). I find it useful to have some small change in my pocket when I arrive.
I do. Mostly, its some coins and bills that I keep as a souvenir of places I’ve been to; though in some cases, I’ve got enough that if I were to go to the place, I wouldn’t have to hit an ATM at my destination. But it’s a varied lot (Australian dollars, British pounds, one or two African currencies), including some pre-Euro currencies: Greek drachmas, Spanish pesetas, French francs, and so on. Interesting souvenirs, anyway.
Oddly, one currency I don’t have on hand is American dollars. They can be exchanged at any bank here, so I buy them before I go to the US; and when I get home, I change them back to Canadian currency. No need to keep them around; I’ll buy some the next time I need some.
I’ll have to wait until tomorrow morning to do a complete list, but I have all sorts of foreign money, both bills and coin, in my desk at school. It comes in handy for illustrating concepts in Econ. Lots of stuff from the Mid-East, and random coinage from Latin America.
When enough coin piles up I either swap it with a friend (I trade Canadian to a Canadian at an annual event at Old Fort Niagara) or I make an eBay lot out of it like I did with a small stack of euro coins lately. Folding money I exchange locally the way some folks run their US change to a CoinStar machine - when there is enough there to justify the time.
I have some really old foreign money, mostly of types no longer in use, from when I was in Europe back in the 80s.
Beyond that I have a lot of money in Canadian dollars and Euros at home because I travel to Canada and Europe fairly regularly. Also some UK money from a trip there a couple of years ago, though I go there far less frequently.
I don’t travel, but work retail fairly close to SF International Airport. I keep one of every nationality / denomination coin I find. I’ve amassed a collection of almost 40 different countries. The oldest non-USA coin I’ve found is a 1916 French 10 centimes.
I don’t hang onto it as a keepsake, I keep it as walking-around money for my next visit. I have about 60 bucks Canadian in various bills and coins. Like Al Bundy, I sometimes get Canadian coins in my change, and they get added to the collection.
It’s a lot more difficult for me to buy Canadian money here than it is for Spoons to buy U.S. money there, so I like to have lunch money until I can get to a bank or ATM.
Bills
1 Croatian kuna
1 Saudi riyal
50 Greek drachma
5000 Turkish lira
Coins
100 Italian lira
100 Kuwaiti fils
1 Canadian dollar
100 Bahraini fils
20 Belgian francs
2 Mexican 1 peso
50 Japanese yen
50 Saudi fils
3 tokens from Chucky Cheese
At home I have maybe $40 in random European coinage, mostly dating from the 1970s.
I have (or had - I haven’t seen it in a while and it may have gotten lost during one of my moves) a Sucrets box with some Canadian money I kept after a trip to Toronto in the late 70s. There may also be some tokens from the Toronto transit system in there. I also have an Irish 50c Euro and a Canadian $2 coin that I used to carry with my pocket change for some reason.
Oh, and I recently bought a Zimbabwe $100 trillion bill, just to have one.
They only money I’ve made a point of keeping is money that my employees have accepted as legit American coins, so far, I have:
Unstamped quarter
One Cent Euro
(2)Something from the UAE that looks like US quarter with a genie lamp on it.
Argentinian Centavo
Philippine 25 Sentimo
Five Cent coin from Nederlanden
10 Cent from Helvetica?
Something from Poland
Something I can’t read the writing on.
Now, those I can understand, they more or less look like US coins.
What I don’t understand is how someone took 10 Dollar Jamaican Coin.
And one other gold coin from Mexico with wavy edges.
Those tokens have actually appreciated - they’re worth $3.00 each now.
I generally travel to the US, so I have a US wallet that I move only the items that I want to take with me into when I leave on a trip. It holds whatever US money I have left until the next trip. Right now I think there is about $23.00 in it.
