Foreign Exchange

Wednesday, July 13th, 2005 | Uncategorized

Wow, what a crock…. I mean I drove all the way to Hilldale today to try to exchange my inherited foreign currency. Originally I had gone to my own bank but they told me the only place in the County that does that was M&I in Hilldale.

I called them up first and described the money and was told that they could probably help me out and that I should come down. So I did.

Well the lady looks over the money and then tells me that none of my very nice looking currency is valid anymore. It is all out of print foreign money, and unlike us Americans who still accept money from 100 years ago anywhere, other Countries are not like that.

Basically I have a pre-war out of print foreign money collection. All the money is in mint condition but there is nowhere to sell it. I talked to a couple coin collectors. They told me that paper money was pretty much worthless no matter what a book that gives it a nice big value says since nobody really wants to buy it, and we all know that something is only worth what somebody is willing to pay for it.

I was also told that it would be hard to sell because not only is it paper, but that it was from so many different countries, you know maybe somebody would be interested in all the Chinese money I had, but they wouldn’t want the Argentina currency with it, etc…

I was hoping to make a quick buck on it, but alas that won’t work… So now I have a couple choices.

I can either A) Make a beautiful eBay page displaying the money, and make it a no-reserve auction that starts at .99 cents and hope that lots of collectors there will see it. I mean when you put something for no-reserve it tends to get lots of bids, especially if you pay a bunch extra to make it appear at the top of the page.

Or I can B) Just keep it, make some sort of display for it all and add it to my collection of high-brow taste items (like my old school beer glass collection). I was thinking if I spread it all out and bought a big piece of glass or something, it would make a nice looking one-of-a-kind coffee table…

For now the first option would require time, so I will not do that, and the second option if I choose to do it will require money and time, as I would want to make it into something really spectacular where you could still see through all that semi-transparent money to the floor / shelves below it, so I would have to make a table from scratch…

For now I am picking option C) It will just sit in a sealed bag collecting dust for the moment.

               

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