It happens more than anyone wants to admit: a family inherits coins and old bills, assumes money is money, and deposits it all at the bank — where a 90% silver quarter credits as twenty-five cents and a hundred-year-old bill credits as its face value. The bank isn't cheating anyone; it's just not the bank's job to know better. It's ours.
Old Money Is Worth More Than It Says
Coins: US dimes, quarters, and halves dated 1964 or earlier are 90% silver — worth a multiple of face value as metal alone, before any collector premium. Silver dollars, wheat pennies, and older type coins carry their own followings. Paper currency: our focus is colonial and early American notes, Civil War era currency, and older US paper money — including the large-size bills from the early 1900s that are physically bigger than modern money. All of it can be worth well beyond the number in the corner, and none of it announces itself — an old note can pass for a slightly odd bill.
How to Handle It Without Becoming an Expert
Gather it all — folders, jars, envelopes of bills, the coffee can from the workshop — and bring it exactly as found to 101 S Main Street in downtown Robersonville. We sort everything with you at the counter: the silver, the collector pieces, the notes worth keeping aside, and the plain modern change that really is just change (that part can go to the bank). Then one fair offer for everything we buy, paid in hand the same day, with a receipt for the estate's records.
Executors and families come to us with exactly this situation from across Eastern NC — Wilson, Washington, Tarboro, Elizabeth City — and from southeast Virginia along the Outer Banks route. For large estates, our buyout guide for administrators covers the whole process, and house calls are available for collections too big to carry.