How to know if old money is worth anything
Banknote & Currency Collecting for Beginners - Old Paper Money 101 (US & World)
Timecodes:
hey everybody christian from treasure
town and we're going to be mostly
focused on
not my face and more on a bunch of cool
notes but this is a pretty sweet one
and essentially i'm just going to be
going over the basics of us currency
history and tips for collecting it
and there's a lot to cover i've got a
handful of notes from the shop also some
stuff that i've got in stock
and it's going to be a cool video so you
know sit back
and enjoy we'll be talking about
everything you need to know as a
currency collecting 101
there's also going to be a little bit
about world collecting if you didn't
know i kind of started my first
collection
as a world typeset of currency so
anyways let's get into it
i've got a lot of cool information
planned
and here we've got an assortment of
currency that probably looks pretty
unfamiliar to a lot of you and i'm going
to be using it as a great place
to kind of start out and talk about a
lot of these notes and give you
the basics so that you can maybe find
what you're interested in this segment
is going to be the u.s
notes and then we're going to go to some
world material briefly at the end
but i think i'm just going to kind of go
in chronological order even if it's not
the easiest step to understand
necessarily at the beginning
what i've got here is a five dollar note
from manchester and if you'll actually
see it says
it was authorized november 20th 1827
and a lot of people don't know this but
while we had coins that started being
made by the federal government in 1792
we didn't really make any you know paper
money on behalf of the federal
government until the civil war
the first one dollar bill was in 1862.
so before that
they had individual banks minting their
own or it's not really minting but they
were printing their own paper notes
there were over 8 000
entities that did so and the bank of
manchester wherever
that would have been um was one of the
ones that did that
now i think one interesting thing is
they obviously would not always um
you know trade for their face value it
wasn't like the united states was there
to back that up
so you'd have to be careful about what
you accepted there was a lot of
counterfeiting since nobody really knew
what exactly each note looked like there
wasn't the security
measures that they have today this one
doesn't have anything on the back in
fact it's kind of been repaired
but this is just kind of an example of
the paper currency that would have been
circulating in the beginning of our
times
after that we see i don't really have
too much of the 1800s currency
but i think the big thing to note is
that you have
these larger dollar bills or you know
paper currency so this was a five dollar
bill
and i'll just kind of compare it to the
more modern and this is even a special
note but this is a
modern size 5 bill it's significantly
larger and they stopped they shifted
away from that
i think kind of in the 19 late 1920s and
that was to
kind of just conserve on ink and paper
and
it saved the government some money now i
actually realized before
i go there we should talk about
fractional currency which the government
made
but that was a lot in the 1860s
and i think a little bit beyond but
let's see if we can find
the date it says samuel dexter he's a
secretary of the treasury
and let's see if the dates on here it
probably
um will be and it took me a while to
find it but right there it says series
of 1873
under the 50 cents so sometimes you
gotta do a little bit
of closer research thanks for watching
let's get back to the video
um the point being is that we also had
fractional currency
it's a little bit cheaper to make in the
short term than a coin
and those were widely used um so there
were different denominations there were
three cents
five cents uh 10 cents 25 cents
lots of different stuff and obviously 50
cents but those were circulating they
didn't last super long
um then we kind of had a variety of
currency this is more of a 101 so i'm
not getting super into it
but this is what a banknote five dollar
bill from 1905 would look like
and a big trend was that there were
national notes so it says national
currency
and this was uh by it was kind of issued
this
this was by susquehanna some of them
would say you know first national bank
of say you know there could be a
reasonable chance that your hometown
if you live on the east coast um
actually was making these and then
there's some kind of in the in the
midwest but
uh there probably wasn't any hawaiian or
alaskan
territory uh banknotes back then
basically
individual national banks would be
issuing them when we go to the national
currency
of 1929 this was from the homer bank of
new york that's a rare
um no and often people collect from
their hometown or they collect
unusual ones or they try to get all as
many 20
bills from different national banks it's
kind of a really neat series
there can be some wild premiums if you
have the right issuing entity
and they're also as you can see pretty
low serial numbers
um you know relative this is 522
and it's well worn but anyways that's
kind of the national banknote
era i think one other thing to note is
how some of our currency seems to stay
the same and i should have the modern
one here i don't
but this is a two dollar red seal 1963
from thomas jefferson
but if we go to 53 it doesn't seem to
change that much
maybe a little bit of a design change
there just in terms of how the note is
laid out
1928 and then we can see that the size
certainly changes
but the overall portrait and just the
general note seems pretty familiar
let's take a look at the back because
they're often really pretty on these
older notes this one's from 1917
and not an uh you know not a note
without any value i actually kind of
want to check out
this what the back of this looks like
wow that's really beautiful
i actually couldn't have brought that to
mind um in in my own
uh you know i didn't have it in my mind
what it looked like
landing of the pilgrims but very
dissimilar from anything that we have
today um i think the other interesting
trend that we can see
just as a heads up is that on these two
dollar bills
you know we've got this 1928 f note it
might be worth like 10 15 bucks
then this one is 1928 a and there's a
lot of series that can make a big
difference on a lot of the older ones
in terms of their value this a note
might be worth 50 bucks 75 bucks
somewhere in that range another thing
that makes notes very valuable
is this star it doesn't really have
quite as much of an effect on the newer
notes
but for the older ones it can often have
outsized
effects so this might be i don't know a
three dollar one dollar silver
certificate that would be worth like a
dollar fifty or two bucks if it didn't
have the star
but if one of these had a star it would
range up in value
quite quickly and that's just something
to
look out for on your currency both the
stars
and what series it'll be and sometimes a
rare series
and a rare star note can combine for
some massive value
now i've got this 10 bill in front of me
it's been here for a while and i just
want to point something out it says
redeemable in gold on demand at the
united states treasury
or in gold or lawful money at any
federal reserve bank so this isn't a
gold certificate but
it says you know it's it's not worth
what a gold certificate would be worth
but
it is redeemable in gold that's
i again don't have any gold certificates
or outside have them
those are a rare um and more expensive
note generally
here we can see on this one and there's
something else special about it but says
silver certificate you could trade
it in and get four silver quarters or
two
silver half dollars or a silver dollar
from the bank if you
you know went to exchange it was
redeemable for for silver
there were also two other special notes
the north african
and hawaiian notes these were
replacement notes in world war
ii that we made and they were
issued in those regions and that way if
either hawaii or north africa was
totally overrun
all of the money would be declared
worthless and the united states wouldn't
incur any financial hit or give up any
financial advantages
this note is from 1928 it's a 20 bill as
well
looks very similar to what we've got
today except that it's also redeemable
in gold on demand so wish i had some of
those uh you know more
expensive gold certificates just to show
you but
it's kind of crazy to think that they
could have exchanged this for a 20
gold you know saint gardens at the time
they were both you know twenty dollars
now
lastly i guess i just wanna show um you
know another silver certificate this one
is a five dollar bill
um this one is also a five dollar bill
both have lincoln
but one's a red seal and not a silver
certificate whereas this is a silver
certificate
i should know i think that they would
trade for the same amount but they are
definitely different
this being a star note is just another
thing look for those
it will add some value and i forgot to
mention there can be some physical
errors this isn't too crazy
but the serial number is bumping up
against the
lettering of america i think that that's
significant and it would command
a slight premium and then yeah lastly i
think we've already been over this one
but just another star note these were
made
1935 to 1957 though
when it says series of 1935 it doesn't
mean it was made in 1935
it could extend quite a bit beyond that
so e
would kind of denote and i should have
probably looked it up before the video
but a series of 1935 would have been
very close to 1935
and 35a would be later 35b 35c
35d you know that might have been made
from 48 to 50 just for example
um 1957 obviously those first ones will
be made in 1957
but they might extend beyond then um and
then when
silver was stopped being made i'm
curious when the silver certificates
kind of rotated out
obviously they had to declare that you
couldn't exchange them for silver at
some point
and i looked it up and it was in march
1964 that this
treasury secretary announced that they
wouldn't be redeemable
for silver but yeah they unfortunately
don't
have that power today or else they would
probably all be redeemed or just worth a
lot more than one dollar
and now we have an introductory kind of
overview
of the us currency we still use it often
today
and i'll talk about world currency after
this
um in the next segment and then i guess
now would be a good time to just say you
know you can do all sorts of things you
could do a typeset where you try to get
one of the you know on the two dollar
bills you could try to get
one from 1928 a 28b 28c
all the way up to 28g you could also try
to get just one 1928
and then a 1917 and then i can't see the
other ones but a 1953 and a 1963.
you could also try to just get one of
each type so you get 19
you know two dollar red seal then you
could get a five dollar red seal
and you know try to get the ten dollar
silver certificate which i don't have in
front of me
and the um ten dollar you know this
redeemable and gold green seal
there's lots of possibilities you could
do a fractional currency you could do a
national
currency kind of just trying to get as
many different banks as possible
again so much out there and good luck
collecting it let's show off
what a world currency collection might
look like and recount how i really
started getting serious about collecting
anything numismatic
and forgive me if this is going to be
too much of a trip down memory lane but
this is my currency collection
written out in my 10 year old
handwriting block letters pretty cool
anyways there's so many ways to collect
and what a quick flip through
will kind of show you is how different
and varied and there's so many different
colors
that world currency offers and that's
something that's fun
about the world currency it's often also
reasonably cheap to buy some pretty cool
looking notes
so you know if we flip to this page it
looks like we've got bermuda
barbados belarus let's flip to another
random page
gibraltar greece guatemala and we'll do
it one more time
we'll see what we've got we've got
poland peru and the philippines
including when the philippines were
occupied
by the japanese government in world war
ii so the point
is there's so much cool stuff out there
um it can be acquired again
pretty cheaply online there's mozambique
myanmar
and morocco so the point is that yeah
there's there's so much out there you
can do it where you collect everything
from
you know all the mozambican currency
that you could have you could try a
typeset collection for europe
there's i think that's hungary you could
try to get all the european
ones you could do you know everything
from you know a certain time period
let's see i think that
that's from iceland maybe that's near
world war two time let's see
um well i'm not sure but you could get
all world war two currency
you could try to do what i'm doing get
just one from anything that ever issued
currency so there's so many ways to
collect i should probably do a full
showing of this for a video down the
road
but that's how i do world currency
really fun and
a much different kind of realm compared
to
uh us currency but as i said there's so
much to offer
in one of the less explored kind of
areas of numismatics
thanks for watching the video i'd
encourage you to like comment and
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and i look forward to seeing you on some
of my future vids
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