All you ever wanted to know....

If the post below wasn’t enough information about the exciting world of euro coin collection, this is surely going to make your day. Here is some more, very interesting information about the effort that is going to go into the collection and some fun trivia facts.

The Euro bank notes and coins were introduced on January 1, 2002 in the 12 Member states of the European Union. There are eight coins and seven different bank notes. There were over 50 billion coins produced for the introduction, all of which have one common side and one custom side (which is designed by each country). The total value of the currency produced for the introduction was 664 billion euros. That is a lot of euros. What about the rest of the European Union countries – aren’t there more than 12 (you may wonder)?? Yes, you are correct, 3 other very small independent countries did issue country euros, however, not for the general population to use as currency, these coins / notes were issued in limited amount for collectors by Monaco, the Vatican, and San Marino. (Thankfully, these countries are not included in my book given that the collector’s sets of the Vatican coins are currently selling for between 400 – 2,000 euros—Yikes!!!). Additionally, other EY member countries, such as the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Malta, Poland, Slovenia, Slovakia, Sweden and the United Kingdom are members of the EU but are not currently participating in the single currency. (interesting!).

So, now we know, the book of 12 countries is an accurate population to pursue and I am off for the search, right??? Well, not quite. An additional interesting fact which I have subsequently learned about the currencies of the world is that in Finland, the Finnish government actually decided not to use the 1 cent and 2 cent coins (huh?). € 0.01 and € 0.02 coins are not used in Finland; only few were minted, for collectors. Sums are rounded to the nearest € 0.05; hence sums ending in € 0.01, € 0.02, € 0.06 or € 0.07 are rounded down, and those ending in € 0.03, € 0.04, € 0.08 or € 0.09 are rounded up. The rounding is applied to the grand total only, while individual prices are still shown and summed up with € 0.01 precision. As an accountant, I find this a very every interesting strategy (remember the movie Office Space… taking the .0001 off of the interest payments??) and as a collector – what am I going to do about this, shouldn’t this have been disclosed to me?? (Well, the obvious answer is Ebay… the 1 and 2 center is going for a couple of dollars..so, I should be okay). But I will keep you up to date on this situation – currently, the only Finland coin that I have is the 50 center, so I could end up either taking a trip to Helsinki or buying a whole set on Ebay… to be determined….

Now, onto the collection efforts… Friday night, Diane, Chris, Diane’s cousin, Todd and I decided to go out to dinner at my favorite neighborhood sushi restaurant. After being embarrassed that the owner recognized my voice on the phone when I was making our reservation and being delighted that he made room for us because I am such a good customer, we ended our cocktail hour at Diane’s apartment and came to my neighborhood to enjoy a very nice sushi and TeppanYaki (known as hibachi in the States – thank you Chris for clarifying) dinner. It was great (as expected) and when the bill came, we paid, and I earnestly waited for the coins to come with eager excitement for what might be included. To my disappointment, it was nothing that I needed (even though it turned out that Diane had a great 2 euro in her purse that she required significant encouragement begging to give away). The owner, John, wondered what we were doing with the lists and the coins, and when I explained, he wanted to get involved with the “cause”, so he opened up the cash register and went through all of the coins to see what he had. Turned out – he had a lot – 2.50 euro worth of things that I needed. I couldn’t believe that he would do that for – it was great. I had to take a picture of him sorting the coins on the sushi table – here it is. Now you definitely don’t see that everyday!!! Still 36 coins to go…..