>For a while there, I used to collect 'old' $20 bills. You know, the
>ones from before they starting putting the strips in them that you
>can track from space, remember? I started by pestering my friends
>to open their wallets to me. After a while, they became harder to
>find, especially since the average street lifetime of a bill in the
>US is about 18 months. Pretty soon, all you got from an ATM was a
>new bill. But then I noticed that people would save them for me:
>"Oh, there's an old one ... I'll be seeing Jordan on the weekend,
>I'll hold on to it for him" ... and I guess I did pretty well for a
>bit.
>
>My goal was to collect them all; what fun that would have been!
I think we have the core of a new currency collectors anonymous here. ;-) The serious collectors of high face-value banknotes are on a different level to me. The old ones are worth a fortune, since hardly anyone could afford to hoard them.
I'm a little less ambitious, taking on somewhat lower-denomination coins, the old pre-decimal florins (face value 20c). They are still expensive, because like the US Australia made coins out of silver up until the late 60's, but at least the lower face value reduces the temptation to just spend them when you need money for something.
Is that what happened to your collection of 20's?
But hoarding coins is extremely common, at least here in Australia. There's hardly a household in the country that doesn't have a tin, or an old sock, full of coins. Its practically un-Australian not to sock away a collection of 50c coins, so much so that half of them simply disappear out of circulation and the mint has to produce twice as many as needed to compensate. Is it the same over there?
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas