Picture of the Day: New Old Coins

Lots of old coins, never used, in a tin box

My relatives have been busy doing some serious spring cleaning in their flat.

They are cleaning out really old magazines, books, clothes and anything else that they don't need; at the moment these items are all stacked up in the living room waiting to be taken away, as they live in a walk-up so they are saving this for the garbage man to manually collect day by day, or to take down themselves to a nearby recycling area or the local garbage dump.

They also found lots of money! Over HK$2,000 in coins! 

Before the Octopus card came out in 1997, people had to have exact change when boarding public transport, from buses to trams and ferries.

So their mother, who passed away several years ago, had gotten coins from the bank to ensure she always had enough change and after the Octopus card came out, the coins were forgotten and so much was amassed that my relatives hauled them to the bank to be counted. They even returned coins with the Queen's head on them (issued before 1997). 

Apparently no one is interested in buying these coins online.

She had also collected stamps and my relatives managed to sell a stamp book or two on an online buying and selling platform called Carousell for about HK$10 each. Who collects stamps these days?

Not only that, she also collected a lot of fresh bills, dating back to the 1970s, all of them from HSBC in a special booklet, and also coins too.

Some date back to 1960 which is quite amazing. They are all rolled up neatly in paper and labelled very clearly. I should also add she used to be a teacher, hence the clean hand writing.

In any event my relatives hope to find a buyer for these coins and bills and I hope they do. One man's junk is another man's treasure!

Spare Change could Make you Rich

Check your spare change to see if you have any old coins of value

Do you still have Hong Kong coins that bear Queen Elizabeth II's head on them? If you do, they could be worth more than face value.

Coins with the queen's head were phased out in 1993

An interesting fact to know is that coins with the queen's head were phased out before 1997 -- four years earlier to be exact.

Another intriguing piece of trivia is that by 2015, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority had collected 880 million pieces of queen's head coins worth HK$1 billion.

But there are still some in circulation, which the HKMA estimates is about 10 percent.

Coins with Queen Victoria could be worth a lot at auction

If you do have some old coins, pay attention!

A 5-cent coin bearing the queen's head recently sold at auction for HK$5,000 -- about 100,000 times its value.

Cheng Po-hung, a coin and stamp collector with his own shop, says some coins bearing the queen's head could be worth five to 10 times their face value, depending on how rare they are.

Those bearing the head of the Queen's father, King George VI, or earlier ones including that of King George V, Edward VII or Queen Victoria could also crop up and could fetch some handsome prices, he says.

Same also goes for coins with King George V and VI

I definitely don't have those much older coins from over a century ago, but maybe I'll have to wait a few more decades before selling my stash of queen's head coins... nevertheless it would be fun to look out for the older ones!