Acquiring foreign money for your collection

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How do you acquire foreign money for your collection?

From people who have travelled overseas
Sometimes people have leftover money from trips abroad, and often it is not a large enough sum to warrant the expense (the mark-up and the commission fees) to exchange or cash it in (to convert it to American dollars). If they are not holding on to the bills for any other particular reason, then they may give them to you for the asking.

From relatives, friends and former neighbors in other countries
Perhaps are lucky enough to have family and acquaintances living outside of the United States. Maybe your high school friends found employment in other parts of the World, or they married foreigners and went to live abroad. Or, they served in the military, the Peace Corps, or any international organization. They even may have become missionaries, business people or adventurers. And, don't forget the exotic vacation your neighbors bragged about. These are all possibilities to obtain low-cost, leftover foreign money for your collection. Any connection to overseas travel can potentially supply you with colorful, unusual World currency.

From your own travels
Perhaps you have had the opportunity to journey across international borders, and have brought home some currency from those trips.

In your own attic or basement
Really wonderful foreign money has been discovered inside shoe boxes and keepsake containers put away and forgotten with time. Historically, people have saved postcards, greeting cards and correspondence for years and years. And sometimes friends and relatives writing from abroad send a bill along as a souvenir, which is often kept among the mail, intact.

From a reputable foreign currency dealer
There are people who serve the foreign money collector market, and they are usually called dealers. They are different from foreign currency exchange bureaus. From a dealer, you can purchase only those bills you like and want. Also, the foreign currency exchange bureaus deal in high quantities, and usually you cannot exchange just one bill from every country. Furthermore, a dealer may offer a wider variety of bills from more countries than a foreign currency exchange bureau can.

Note: A foreign currency exchange office will not charge just one single transaction fee for converting American dollars into more than one type of foreign currency. It is, therefore, more cost-effective for the collector to acquire bills from a dealer, rather than from a foreign currency exchange bureau. Furthermore, from a dealer, there can be a choice as to the condition of the bill being considered for purchase. This is usually not the case at foreign currency exchange bureaus, where the clerks are almost always unfamiliar with the higher standards of collectors, and they may not have the patience to sort through their different bundles of bills.




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