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Randomly Encountered & OOP Coins Or Currency

liveinabin

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Nothing too odd but I thought I would share a couple of occasions when coins have randomly appeared.

About 10 years ago I went to Japan with my husband. We were waiting in the departures of Heathrow when I left him sitting with our bags while I went to the toilet.
When I got back my husband told me that while I was gone a man came over briefly and sat next to him. When he got up he left a centime coin behind him. This was a few years after the Euro and the centime had very little value before that, let alone after. Yes it's not unusual for a small coin to drop out of a man's pocket but this was about 5 years after France changed to the Euro.
Almost exactly the same thing happened when going on holiday a couple of years ago. However I don't recall the coin, but I do remember it being something unusual.

These incidents were brought to mind a couple of days ago when I found another out of place coin.
I live in a very typical 1940s semi detached. It has an arched storm porch with a step. About a week ago I opened my front door to go out to go to work when I noticed a very shiny coin on the doorstep. It was a 5p coin, but not an ordinary one. It was a Falkland Islands 5p. I'm used to seeing channel Island and Gibraltar coins in my change but I've never seen a Falkland Islands one.
No one had, to my knowledge, come to my door since I had come home the night before. The coin couldn't have rolled there as the step is far too high.

I have kept the coin, and I do have the centime somewhere, but we have moved house since then.
 
When he was alive my husband used to put his spare coins in a jar. After he died I kept finding mainly 5cents everywhere in the house, which I also put in the jar.
After awhile the jar was pretty full so I gave it to my grandaughters saying that their Poppa wanted them to have it.
My daughter told me they got over $50 each.
 
I keep an eye out for unusual coins in my change, and I'm always pleased when a Gibraltar pound or Jersey 20p turns up. I've never spotted a pound coin from the Channel Islands (probably because they still mostly use £1 notes), but I do have a Falklands pound coin somewhere in the house.

I don't suppose that most of you examine your change that closely, but next time you do, see how many different £1 coins you can spot. It won't take you long to see 10 or 15 different reverse designs.
 
I keep an eye out for unusual coins in my change, and I'm always pleased when a Gibraltar pound or Jersey 20p turns up. I've never spotted a pound coin from the Channel Islands (probably because they still mostly use £1 notes), but I do have a Falklands pound coin somewhere in the house.

I don't suppose that most of you examine your change that closely, but next time you do, see how many different £1 coins you can spot. It won't take you long to see 10 or 15 different reverse designs.
This is a dumb question, no doubt, but these can't all be legal tender in your country, right? So doesn't this mean you are being shortchanged quite often? :eek: We very occasionally find Canadian coins in our change, and once, bizarrely, an iraqi coin came back with our change from the corner shop. It's rare though. A truly weird thing was the time I found a British pound coin on our bathroom floor. My daughter does live in the UK, but she had not visited any time recently and there was no other easy explanation....
Sorry for that mess of a post BTW. I'm trying to post from a phone and its not working so well!
 
I once found two pound coins in the street within a week of each other. I've never found them before or since.

When I worked for a charity we ended up with a big bag of foreign coins that people had put in our collection boxes over the years. I guess people thought we could bank them, but banks and travel exchanges won't take anything smaller than a Euro.

The only way to turn them into cash was to flog them by weight for a pittance to a metal reclamation company who would then melt them down.
 
This is a dumb question, no doubt, but these can't all be legal tender in your country, right? So doesn't this mean you are being shortchanged quite often? :eek:

Not a dumb question at all, not least because the definition of legal tender is quite confusing. However, even though Jersey, say, or the Isle of Man are not part of the UK, they are still "British" enough to have a system of currency whose coins look like, and are worth exactly the same as, UK money. So while banknotes would probably not be accepted, because they do look different, coins are spent and received quite freely.
 
I don't suppose that most of you examine your change that closely, but next time you do, see how many different £1 coins you can spot. It won't take you long to see 10 or 15 different reverse designs.

I never have that much change!!
But you are right, the designs are interesting.

And the question about them being legal tender - I don't think they are, but they are the same size and shape as British coins and you could give and receive them in change without noticing.

Screen Shot 2015-12-23 at 21.26.47.png


Any way, here is the coin in question.
 
I don't think I have ever had a Falklands coin in my change.
 
Sitting at my kitchen table, i started to move my right foot around for some reason. I was almost shoving my foot up against the foot of the chair and i started to hear and feel a cruch. Looked down, under my foot was a silver certificate one dollar bill. Silver certificates have been out of circulation for decades. How did one end up under my kitchen table? No one here claimed ownership.
 
Sitting at my kitchen table, i started to move my right foot around for some reason. I was almost shoving my foot up against the foot of the chair and i started to hear and feel a cruch. Looked down, under my foot was a silver certificate one dollar bill. Silver certificates have been out of circulation for decades. How did one end up under my kitchen table? No one here claimed ownership.

Quote from Wikipedia:

Since 1968 they have been redeemable only in Federal Reserve Notes and are thus obsolete, but still valid legal tender and thus are still an accepted form of currency.
 
Sitting at my kitchen table, i started to move my right foot around for some reason. I was almost shoving my foot up against the foot of the chair and i started to hear and feel a cruch. Looked down, under my foot was a silver certificate one dollar bill. Silver certificates have been out of circulation for decades. How did one end up under my kitchen table? No one here claimed ownership.

That's seriously weird! First question - are you in the US? Many people of a certain age have a few silver certificates sqirreled away as a curiosity, so could it be that someone long ago had tucked one away in your kitchen and it had finally got loose? This theory depends on my second and third questions, about the age and provenance your kitchen or its furniture. Did you perhaps inherit or buy the furniture from some older people who may have lost one down the back where it disappeared into an area between joints, or something like that?

Of course, if there is no reasonable explanation, you just might have a case of money from nowhere
forum.forteantimes.com/index.php?threads/money-literally-appeared-out-of-nowhere.27175/
or money from out of the blue
forum.forteantimes.com/index.php?threads/money-from-out-of-the-blue.27613/
Links are obsolete. These threads have been merged into a single thread:

Money From Out Of The Blue
https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/money-from-out-of-the-blue.1470/


The latter thread is (I ithink) where I wrote the story of asking for randomly appearing money as a "sign" and having all sorts of odd money happenings (including the pound coin in the bathroom and a Mexican peso inside my pillow case!)
 
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Just google "pound coin designs", and the Royal Mint webpage at the first link is a good place to start. It shows the 24 that have been issued in the UK so far. You'd possibly have to do separate searches for Gibraltar, IOM, the Falklands and Ascension Island to see the designs for those respective territories.

And don't forget - only a year until the UK changes to a 12-sided pound coin!
 
Never had any mysterious or extraordinary coinage turn up, but I did have a lucky three hours once. Starting work one day, (I work outside) and being more than a bit short and a bit low, and uncomfortably far from payday, I voiced an internal shout out to whatever forces might be in charge of such things that I would be sincerely grateful, and a better person, if they'd help me out.
Less than an hour later I found a twenty pound note in an unmarked envelope! I was totally overjoyed, but even more amazed when twenty mins later a tenner blew past! I could have danced a jig :)
Instead I stopped to surreptitiously text my wife. As I did so a fiver blew right up to my feet :)
Never had a day money was so keen on me :D
How's everyone else for timely windfalls? :)
 
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