

Hire a professional appraiser to grade your coins and tell you how much it is worth. The Pratt Library cannot appraise coins or bills. Mint and Collector's Corner offers a glossary and other basics on coin collecting. Here are some other sources of information about U.S. Guide Book of United States Coins (also known as the "Red Book"), is considered the standard reference for U.S. If your foreign coin or bill is only worth its "face" value, use OANDA to convert its value to U.S. Once you know the date, country, and issue of a coin or bill, you can look up the value. If you are researching the value of an older coin or bill, keep in mind that the country's name may have changed over time.Banknote World includes scanned images of paper money.Nations Online offers a list of all the countries of the world and their local names.has a list of image, denomination, and keyword "identifiers" that could help you figure out the issuing country.A coin or bill's design often includes the name of the country, in that country's official language.Some price guides have separate sections for commemoratives or other "special" issues.Whether the coin or bill is a "general issue" or a "commemorative.".Finding Values for Currencyīefore you begin looking for the value of a coin or bill, you need to know: Kitco gives live market quotes for gold, silver, and other metals that can be used to make this calculation. Multiply the result of the first calculation by the current price of the precious metal in the coin.This will establish how much of the precious metal you have to sell. Multiply the weight of the coin by the percentage "fineness" of the coin (the percentage of the coin that is gold or silver).According to Roderick Hughes' Official Know-It-All Guide, Coins, you can find out the value of the metal if you: If a coin is too damaged to have value as a collectible, its metal content (the amount of gold or silver in the coin) may have a "basal" value. If you're interested in paper money, refer to the International Bank Note Society's grading standards.If you're interested in coins, see the American Numismatic Association's Coin Grading brochure.There are specific standards that define what "mint," "poor," and other grades mean:.When a bill is in mint condition, it is worth more than the same bill in poor condition.Coins and bills can grade from "mint" or "uncirculated" (no signs of wear) to "poor".Most price guides give values for several grades.To see demand in action, look at the prices on eBay's coin and paper money page - when more people want to buy a certain item (a high demand), the price often goes up.The demand might be higher or lower in different areas of the world, or during different years.Rarity also involves the number of those coins or bills that are still around today.ĭemand varies according to the popularity and availability of a coin or bill: Rarity involves the number (or "mintage") of coins or bills that were originally produced. There are several factors that influence the value of a coin or bill: Wholesale value can also be a discounted price that a dealer would accept from a buyer who is purchasing in large quantities. Wholesale value is the price for which a dealer would sell a coin to another dealer. So, if a dealer wants to stay in business, they usually offers lower buy prices than retail prices.


Retail value is the price for which a dealer would sell a coin or bill to you. This price is called the "book" value because you would typically find it in a published book such as the Standard Catalog of World Coins.īuy price is the price that a dealer would be willing to pay you if you sold them your coin or bill. The coin was then sold to the shoe designer Stuart Weitzman in 2002 for $7.6 million, which set a record at the time, before Weitzman put it up for sale again in 2021.Basically, there are four different types of "value" for coins and bills:īook value is an average of many dealers' retail prices for a certain coin or bill - in other words, what the average dealer would sell it for. This coin was only able to be sold by a private collector after a legal battle between the United States Treasury and a former owner of the coin, who was granted possession. However, it's believed that 13 coins did make it into circulation, and in 1944 the Secret Service declared that if any collectors possessed any of the coins, they would be considered stolen. Its value is due to the fact that the 1933 edition never actually entered circulation, with most examples returned to and melted down by the US government. The coin now holds the record for the most expensive ever sold, more than doubling the previous record. Remarkably, the coin's face value is just $20. An extremely rare Double Eagle coin sold for a record price of $18.9 million at a Sotheby's auction on 8 June 2021.
