While exchanging some currency in Spain I received 4 1928 Bills. I was so surprised how old there were and was searching on the history a bit. Are these worth anymore more than face value before I have to deposit them into the bank and the Fed gets a hold of them to destroy? I might keep them for the heck of it, but $400 a good bit of money for me. Thanks for the help!
My book is several years out of date but it shows the 1828 in mint as $475 and the 1828 A as about $300-$325 in mint
Cool find. Too bad about their condition. Combined value may be $500 at best......personally, I would offer them to anybody with $100 and a SASE, or I would spend them. I would not keep them in my collection. edited to add; Welcome to Coin Talk @Aaron Vaughan
Love how old bills come out of the woodwork when exchanging money - I've ended up with more than a few that were not good in Europe after the big head bills came out in 1996-2006.
What part of Spain did you do the exchange? Did you exchange at the airport? Did you actually find any history? I saw some old bills such as yours for sale as antiques when visiting the Flea Markets and shops of Barcelona.
They are out there, I got one at one of my banks earlier this year. Tellers really give them the look through and then call me to come pick it up. One of my banks calls me when they get old stuff in to authenticate the notes.
They used you to get rid of notes they were having difficulty unloading. An expat may find himself offered all sorts of notes that the owner finds hard to monetize. Lenin in the early 1920's introduced the New Economic Policy (NEP), that legalized some private businesses, especially those that could bring in hard currency, or actually plant a crop worth harvesting. Later under Stalin, NEP men were retroactively redefined as economic criminals, and woe to the NEP man caught with foreign currency. After the USSR dissolved, a house in Moscow was being remodeled. The workmen burst through a false panel into a space where stacks of British "white notes" - all with dates no later than 1923, but in denominations up to fifty pounds(!) along with some scarce regional issues - were uncovered. Many notes were worn, brittle and/or mouse gnawed. But so what if that's the only one of two known? It's not hard to figure out what likely occurred- entrepreneur uses international contacts to operate a business that requires a store of British pounds. Cool for a while. Lifetime in the Gulag shortly thereafter. Hand it over as ordered by Stalin's men? They'll take it and then kill you anyway. May as well make them find it. They never did. Later, the modern discovers were afraid that the overall shabby appearance of the hoard meant they'd be lucky if they got face value in sterling. They did, and were pleased. Many others were in turn pleased, in ways little and large.
My 2010 price guide puts them all at $120. However, the first one is more circulated, so it's worth less, the last one has writing in ink on the reverse so that lowers the value. These prices were 6 years ago, and they have gone up. If you look at these same notes on EBAY they are going for well over book. I would save these.
