Perhaps you have an old piece of paper money stuffed away in the family Bible, or you stumble upon some stashed away in a hidden compartment of something you own, have found in your grandparents attic, or in something you got at a rummage, estate, or yard sale. Perhaps you bought an unopened box from a flea market with contents unknown and inside you have found some old money. Sometimes, this money is worthless, and other times, it can be worth a while lot of money. You need to know the value of old paper money before you part with it.

As with many other things that are old, the value of old paper money first rests on how old it is. Something that is merely twenty years old really does not have much value above the face value of the note. This is for common money that has been in circulation for a long time. Foreign money that has age to it may be of more value, but that is not always the case. You can do a search on more common types of money to see what you can find through the Internet. There are some great sources online for this type of information.

Secondly, you have to think about how common or uncommon the bill might be. The value of old paper money goes up when the notes were not common. The two dollar bill is not necessarily old, but in a hundred years, it could be worth quit a bit of money. Today, they are not worth much though. If you can find notes that are over a hundred years old, you may be on to something. These could be foreign or domestic notes. Things like these tend to disappear over time, so the less there are of them, the more they are worth to you if you decide to sell.

The value of old paper money goes up dramatically when you pair the above to things with an historical event. If you find old notes from the civil war in the US, you could have something that is worth quite a bit of money. If you can find money that was brought over to America from the old world, you really have something amazing, though you should note that coins were the most common type of currency back then and finding such a thing is rare. You should always have someone authentic such a note because there are many fakes out there.

It wasn’t always that we used paper currency as money. Contrary to popular beliefs, barter trade is unlikely to be the primary form of trade in any of the early societies in history. This is because it is difficult and rare for two people to have a coincidence of wants where one person has a product that he wishes to trade for a readily available commodity that another person is also willing to trade and vice versa. So instead of relying to the very limited possibilities of simple barter, people used commodity money where naturally scarce precious metals, shells and beads were used as objects of value to be traded for products.

Standards were then set for commodity money, such as certain weights for gold and silver. After that, metal alloys took over because some countries lacked the supply of precious metals, others minted coins with seals of their country to discourage their citizens from trading with foreigners. Coinage further evolved to bills of exchange; it is similar to an IOU note, which promises to pay the seller a certain amount of money which can then be exchanged to a merchant banker for money, gold, silver or the used commodity currency. Making a long story short, institutions such as banks came about, further backed by laws made by the government. These bills of exchange became very reliable and has then been standardized to become the most common type of physical money today – paper money also known as banknotes.

There were times when some countries had a shortage of their precious metals such as copper and other metals used for making money, hence paper was used and was guaranteed by the government. Moreover, the number of saleable commodities was increasing while scarce precious metals remained limited in amount. Hence if there were a shortage of the latter, trade would be problematic. The production of paper money is also much cheaper than the processing of precious and semi-precious metals. They are divisible, durable, and easier to carry than metals which can be very heavy especially if you need to use huge amounts. There are also many measures taken to ensure that money cannot be counterfeited, and so it also secure.

With an almost universal use of paper money as a means of trade, is it possible to be replaced by electronic or plastic money? Some say no because money, be it commodity or paper currency needs to be tangible as it is to be traded also for a product that is tangible. However, we can never be a hundred percent sure for there is also the advantages and convenience of your credit and debit cards. And like the gold and silver currency which dominated our economy for the longest of time, it can still be replaced by a better alternative.