What’s a $2 bill worth? About the same as two $1 bills, right? Or eight quarters? Put three of them together, and you have enough for your next Starbucks run. (Maybe.)
I mean, two bucks is two bucks, isn’t it? Well … it depends.
One auction house has a $2 bill on its website that it says might go for as much as $12,000.
Let me write that out for anyone who might think I put the decimal point in the wrong place: twelve thousand dollars. That’s for one $2 bill, not 6,000 of them.
The bill in question, viewable here, in an uncirculated example from 1869. The auction company, Heritage Auctions — which CBS News said is the largest auction company in the world that deals with currency — said a similar bill went for $12,000 in its last Long Beach auction.
That bill was “just eight serials away” from the one currently up for bid, so I guess we’ll see how much a serial number is worth when the final price for this one comes in.
Obviously, older bills in excellent condition tend to bring in more than newer ones that have been a little used. Uncirculated examples older than 1900 are all likely to be worth hundreds of dollars each, at least — possibly thousands, according to U.S. Currency Auctions’ website.
And virtually any $2 bill with a red seal (or a seal of any color but green, really, which came into use in 1976) is going to be worth more than face value if it’s in good condition.
“If you’re looking for a high-dollar $2 bill, it would be pre-1900, and it would have to be in a very high condition graded condition,” Art Pinto, manager of Legacy Coins and Curiosities in Lutz, Florida, told Fox News.
But that doesn’t mean that no newer bills can’t also bring a premium price.
Heritage Auctions told CBS that a 2003 bill with a “very low serial number” went for $2,400 in a recent auction, and then soon resold for $4,000.
The bills have never been very popular, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing told CBS. They’re “awkward” in calculations using a base-10 system, and some people even consider them “unlucky.”
(Those people never found one with a blue seal in a junk drawer somewhere, I think it’s safe to assume.)
Both CBS and Fox cited the U.S. Currency Education Program as saying that there were about 1.2 billion $2 notes in circulation with a face value of — you guessed it — $2.4 billion.
But face value isn’t the whole story, obviously.
This short video purports to identify “all” the possibly valuable $2 bills you might encounter, though even the narrator says the one you have hidden in your sock drawer is probably worth $2.
Still, hope springs eternal. It can’t take long to compare any you might have on hand to a list of possibly valuable specimens.
And who knows? Maybe yours will turn out, after all, to be the stuff that dreams are made of.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
