Pay Attention to Your Money
Mar. 18th, 2011 01:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wwcitizenMoney is fascinating. The history of money tells the story of civilization, commerce, governments, economies. It's hard to imagine the world without money and everything being taken care of, but more and more people are using credit cards, online bill paying, and check cards, such that money isn't as noticeable. When I'm in another country, I try to save a little bit of the money (a coin or a bill) as a souvenir.
It's fun to pay attention to your bills!
Do you ever go to WheresGeorge.com? Do you know what it is? WheresGeorge.com is a fun site to enter your US bills and see whether they've been and where - after you've spent the money - they end up. How often do you see the stamp on any of your bills like this?
Someone somewhere along the line of this website and tracking mechanism decided to make a red-ink stamp - like you see on this one-dollar bill section pictured above. I don't have one one of the convenient stamps; I've see that people have sometimes taken to writing "WheresGeorge.com" in red ink on the bills they catalog. Anytime I find one of these "marked" bills, I try to enter it into the system as soon as possible. If I have nothing to do on a given night, I'll enter all my bills ($1 mostly, $5 sometimes, and $10s & $20s). It's fun to see if anyone has also entered any of the unmarked bills.
It's fun to pay attention to your coins!
When I was a little boy (yes, I was once) growing up in the 70s, before more TV channels than you could surf in one day, and cell phones or computers, my dad got me into "looking coins", as he called it. Dad sat me down at a gray metal military-looking folding desk. Then, with a wide smile, he whipped out a couple of rolls of dimes, nickels, or pennies onto the desk's surface. The nickels and pennies were more numerous. He was bringing me up to be a numismatist!
I opened the wrapping carefully so the coins didn't go everywhere, one roll at a time. He told me, "Go through and look your coins to find oddities." I took that "look" to mean carefully scrutinize every coin, front and back, to see the oddities. The most blatant were always easy to spot: different mints, various minting years, different pictures on the fronts and backs, and sometimes missing things - like the mint stamps. There are multiple minting facilities, but for the people's currency, it's either "P" for Philadelphia, which is prevalent on the east coast, or "D" for Denver, which are prevalent in middle America and the west coast. If you're in Texas or Chicago, it's hit or miss what you'll find, for instance.
This past Christmas, my dad gave us kids all some coins he saved for us from years ago. I've been periodically spending time looking my coins - pennies, nickels, dimes, half-dollars, dollar coins, etc. After I'm done, they're all going into a (FREE!) safety deposit box. Here are some pictures of new pennies! Have you seen these? I think they're really cool and it's fun that the US mint is noticing a rise in coin collecting as a result.
It's fun to pay attention to your bills!
Do you ever go to WheresGeorge.com? Do you know what it is? WheresGeorge.com is a fun site to enter your US bills and see whether they've been and where - after you've spent the money - they end up. How often do you see the stamp on any of your bills like this?
Someone somewhere along the line of this website and tracking mechanism decided to make a red-ink stamp - like you see on this one-dollar bill section pictured above. I don't have one one of the convenient stamps; I've see that people have sometimes taken to writing "WheresGeorge.com" in red ink on the bills they catalog. Anytime I find one of these "marked" bills, I try to enter it into the system as soon as possible. If I have nothing to do on a given night, I'll enter all my bills ($1 mostly, $5 sometimes, and $10s & $20s). It's fun to see if anyone has also entered any of the unmarked bills.
It's fun to pay attention to your coins!
When I was a little boy (yes, I was once) growing up in the 70s, before more TV channels than you could surf in one day, and cell phones or computers, my dad got me into "looking coins", as he called it. Dad sat me down at a gray metal military-looking folding desk. Then, with a wide smile, he whipped out a couple of rolls of dimes, nickels, or pennies onto the desk's surface. The nickels and pennies were more numerous. He was bringing me up to be a numismatist!
I opened the wrapping carefully so the coins didn't go everywhere, one roll at a time. He told me, "Go through and look your coins to find oddities." I took that "look" to mean carefully scrutinize every coin, front and back, to see the oddities. The most blatant were always easy to spot: different mints, various minting years, different pictures on the fronts and backs, and sometimes missing things - like the mint stamps. There are multiple minting facilities, but for the people's currency, it's either "P" for Philadelphia, which is prevalent on the east coast, or "D" for Denver, which are prevalent in middle America and the west coast. If you're in Texas or Chicago, it's hit or miss what you'll find, for instance.
This past Christmas, my dad gave us kids all some coins he saved for us from years ago. I've been periodically spending time looking my coins - pennies, nickels, dimes, half-dollars, dollar coins, etc. After I'm done, they're all going into a (FREE!) safety deposit box. Here are some pictures of new pennies! Have you seen these? I think they're really cool and it's fun that the US mint is noticing a rise in coin collecting as a result.
