I have a big bag of odd (and old) coins that were in my pockets whenever I returned from a trip out of the U.S. over the past half-century, and since I’m planning another trip this week, I decided to go through the bag and separate all these coins by the country each one came from. I took the coins from the country I plan to visit. Then I decided to sort the other 500 or so coins from various countries.
It was not so easy. My eyesight isn’t great these days, even with a good magnifying glass and te camera on my phone, and the markings on the coins are astonishingly hard to discern. Two questions: 1) is there a good website that depicts clearly coins of the world so I can maybe look at a coin and the website and see if it is obvious which country it’s from, even if I can’t make out the fine print?
And 2) some of these coins are from countries that no longer use them. Most are centime pieces and francs from France, probably less than 20 dollars’ worth, all told, so no big deal financially. I assume that the time to turn them into Euros has long passed and now they are just souvenirs. Is this correct? I still need to sort them out but luckily old francs are surprisingly insubstantial, and so can be sorted by weight, which is “almost nothing,” but I wonder if I can do anything with them besides reminiscing about my youthful trips in France.
UNICEF has a program to collect change from international airline passengers to support the organization. Normally, this would be change leftover from overseas flights but they might be able to use your old change. Depending on your airline, you may be able to give this money to the flight crew.
Believe it or not Wikipedia is pretty good at that, at least as far back as maybe 1900 coinage. See here as an example:
As to your coins’ value as money, it’s a decent bet many are obsolete and now just souvenirs or eBay fodder.
I have a friend / co-worker who travels extensively and recently had challenges with fairly new Colombian paper currency he had left over from not that long ago. The old bills from before roughly 2016 had been demonetized back in 2020. When he and I visited Colombia in late 2023 no merchants were allowed to accept them. They could be exchanged at a branch of the national bank, and only the national bank. Otherwise he had a couple hundred $US equivalent of fancy but grubby paper.
Conveniently the national bank is also one of the major retail banks in the country with branches in every city and significant town. Shame we were there mostly over a holiday weekend. But he did get them converted to modern COP bills so they’re spendable for at least another decade. He hopes.
Unless they have silver content, the value is nearly nothing. There are rare foreign coins, of course, but the likelihood that you would have gotten one in pocket change approaches zero at a rapid rate. I also have a bunch of coins left over from travel. A lot of pfennigs, which are as insubstantial as centimes. A couple of unreadable ancient Roman coins that are equally worthless. I really need to throw these away, as none of my grandkids have any interest in collecting.
Many international airports have places to deposit small denomination foreign coins and currency for charity. It’s often a giant plastic globe with slots for donations. Probably located near the currency exchanges which won’t change smaller denominations.
Yes, it is. The old French coins could be exhanged for euros at the Banque de France until 17 February 2005 (and notes could be exchanged until 17 February 2012), but not any longer.
The answer will differ for coinage from other countries. The former Austrian, Finnish, German, Irish and Spanish currencies can still be exchanged for euros at the central banks of those countries.
And they’d be happy to have you leave them some local currency / coinage you won’t be needing on your way out to go home. They would not be happy to receive a couple pounds of coins from random countries other than their own.
We had some lying around the house that got used as props in a play (IIRC, Man of La Mancha, so from a time when coins would have been the standard form of money). That’s probably only good for coins that are particularly (physically) large, and preferably shiny.
There are all sorts of currencies collected there. That’s the whole point of it being in the international terminal. As mentioned above, airline attendants even distribute envelopes for depositing your foreign coins and currency for charity. The sorting itself may well be part of a work program for the developmentally disabled, as far as I know.
If you have leftover currency that’s still legal currency, that’s an option. I think it would be really rude to drop a lot of obsolete coins in one of those.
I have an enormous collection of obsolete coins, because my grandparents traveled extensively and kept their spare change as souvenirs. And at some point, my grandmother gave them to me. I have old coins from most of the European nations, from several African nations, from parts of Asia. I think it’s very unlikely that any of them are still legal currency anywhere, and i suspect the most valuable things about the collection is all the cute little snap coin purses they are in (which are in excellent shape. I did steal one of them to carry coin-like “checkers” that i sometimes use when talking about technical details of square dancing.)
I consider them a souvenir of my grandparents, and like have the collection, which doesn’t take a ton of space. But if i wanted to downsize, I’d look into whether they belong in metal recycling or in landfill.
I buy cheap junk foreign coins with animals on them and leave them laying around somewhere where children might find them. I’m hoping that every now and then a small child will tell his or her parents, “Look what I found. Look what I found. … ad infinitum” all afternoon.
