My wife and I try to keep our hands on foreign coins and old coins that we come across.
A while back, in the change from a gin and tonic at the local dive we used to frequent, we got back a 1/2 sen piece from Indonesia. I thought that was pretty cool.
We are rebuilding our coins though, after getting robbed. I just love having actual silver around. I’m weird.
Cool! Now you can say that you come from “old money” 
I wonder what www.Wheresgeorge.com would make of this one? (I have that open in another tab… Girl Scout cookie proceeds, dontcha know…). Nah, doesn’t go any earlier than 1963.
When I was a kid, my father had about 15-20 old silver dollars (some from the 19th century) in a little box on his dresser. One day I was mad at him for something, so I took the silver dollars and spent them on god-knows-what. I didn’t have enough brains to **SELL **them, mind you, I simply **SPENT **them at face value.
I think I couldn’t sit down for a week, when my father found out.
About 2 years ago, I was at the top of Mt. Tom in Holyoke MA. Back around the time of WWII, a plane full of soldiers crashed into the side of the mountain. These soldiers were returning home from Europe. All died. A memorial has since been erected. Over the last 50+ years, the mountain has been releasing scrap from the crash. Every time there’s a heavy thaw, more of the mountain erodes, uncovering more stuff. People have been collecting the scrap and leaving it behind the wall of the memorial.
Anyway, when I was there, I was exploring the woods far away from the crash site and the memorial. I found a coin. I think it was from Denmark. Dated 1914 or something like that. I didn’t know if it was worth anything. I still don’t actually. I buried it under the pile of scrap. It didn’t seem right to take it with me. It was really cool looking though. If I remember correctly, it had a bear on one side.
I’ve been giving my husband and daughter new “Walking Liberty” silver coins for presents every year for the past few years. They’re beautiful coins and it’s a nice way to build up a stash. Of course I give other presents as well, but they enjoy getting another coin for their collections on each occasion.
Second hand story: An uncle of mine had several hundred silver dollars in a safe deposit box. He killed himself and didn’t leave a will. So, when the safe deposit box was opened, the state of California had a tax guy present. According to the cousin who told me this story, California taxed the estate based on the collectors value of the silver dollars. I would have thought that was illegal, but the cousin swore it was true.
My aunt killed herself with no will. We didn’t have to have anyone present when we opened her safe-deposit box. She owned a business, so ostensibly, she could have had money or other items of value in there, but no one had to come with us.
1935? That’s amazing. Only a few times have I ever found anything like that, and some of those were under special circumstances. For some reason, when I was in college in the 1970’s, my bank had lots of new, crisp $2 from the 1950s that apparently had never been circulated. They were “United States Notes” and had red seals instead of green, and bore the “pay to the bearer” language. I asked for those whenever I withdrew cash and saw that they got circulated. They weren’t worth anything above face value anyway. Another time I got a a $20 Federal Reserve Note which looked almost like the ones from the 1970s and 1980s except that it too bore the “pay the bearer” language below Jackson’s potrait.
As for coins, just about the only old coins I ever see routinely are nickels, since they alone are not worth more than their face value by virtue of their metal content.
I have a little velvet bag of old silver coins; mostly just dimes and quarters, but also some old Mexican silver.
If I ever need to hire the Three Musketeers to do something, I know what I can use to pay them.
I worked as a bank teller for several years and would run across old and unusual coins and bills fairly often. The oddest, though, I’m sure I’ll never see again. It was a miscut, misprinted $10 bill in immaculate condition. To see what I mean, take a bill and lay it flat, face up. Now take the bottom left corner and fold it until the point is in the middle of the bill. Crease the fold. That’s how this bill was printed - front and back. The fold had to have happened on a blank sheet of paper stock. All cutting and printing (a multistep process on currency) happened after the paper was folded and it somehow got by all QC inspections. An extremely rare error. The cutting error made the bill, when folded out, look vaugely chevron shaped.
The lady who brought it to my window said she got it in her pay and wanted to know if it was real. I looked it over and told her it was, indeed, a real bill. She asked “Well, can you exchange it for a good bill?” I told her she could take it to the coin store around the corner and probably get substantially more than $10 for it. She declined and asked for a “good” bill instead. I gave her one out of my own pocket and took hers. I kept it for a few years and eventually sold it for about $120.
It was probably worth more, but collectors of “freak currency” are few and far between. Like any collectible, it’s value is whatever someone is willing to pay.
U.S. Coins <-- Yahoo link
I am clueless as to the worth of any of them.
Does anyone know where a good online value chart/guide can be found?
Any guesses what this set is worth? Anybody?
Thanks.
Yeah, Me.
The silver coins are currently worth about 6 times the face value(a dime is worth 60 cents.)
Thanks Sam.
Just to clarify, the 1880 silver dollar and the two "peace’dollars from '22 and '23 are only worth 6x the face value?
I thought they could be worth a bit more.