Foreign Currency for the Dummy Numismatist

Miscellaneous foreign coins (mostly francs)

You'll never know who asked some of the stupid questions that get "answered" by freelancers at eHow.com, but (fortunately for us at the Antisocial Network) you usually know who answers them. You can even follow some of them around from the site's version of a profile page and see what other stupid things they've said. We did precisely that with Tom Lutzenberger, previously caught misinforming the public in Sewer Gas, the Dummy Version. Well, Tom's back today, this time holding forth on another topic about which he apparently knew nothing: "How to Find the Value of Foreign Coins."¹

Let's say you found a Canadian quarter or an Australian dollar under the table in the break room. How much, you ask yourself, is this coin worth? Well, if you have any common sense (a trait so many eHow contributors seem to lack) you'd find a website to tell you the current rate of exchange for foreign currency. According to our favorite, a site called OANDA, at today's exchange rate that quarter's worth about 19¢ and the dollar is more like 75¢. No big deal...

Unless you want to follow Lutzenberger's suggestions, which are (summarized here)

"Try to identify the coin." Tom says that "Many times modern governments stamp coins with their country name..." – Duh: all coins have the name of the issuing country, it's just that you can't read some of the alphabets and don't recognize some names, e.g., "Suomi" is Finland and "Magyar Republik" is Hungary.  "Research..."  – Tom suggests going to the library, even buying a book. Dumbass.  More stupid stuff Grade the coin, which Lutzenberger mistakenly terms "Categorize the condition of your coin."  – Yeah, really: only a hardcore numismatist can grade his or her own country's coins, much less a random coin from a random country. Dumbass! "Hire a professional coin grader to examine your coin."  – He's kidding, right? Even the dumbass himself says there's a fee and shipping charges - for a Canadian quarter worth nineteen cents???! "Grade your coin..." – Is there an echo in here, Tom, you Dumbass? "Compare your coin and its status category with the same coins in various markets." – "Status category"? Does this dumbass mean "grade"?

Where did Lutzenberger go wrong (besides writing for eHow in the first place)? He assumed that people want to know the value of rare (and usually old) foreign coins; but that's the unlikely scenario. The more likely scenario is that the questioner found a foreign coin somewhere and wonders whether it's worth keeping – not whether he will get rich. McDonalds used to give out foreign coins in HappyMeals®, so you can bet a lot of them weren't worth more than a couple of cents.

If a coin isn't gold or silver and isn't older than, say, forty years old or so, the chances that it's worth more than face value are vanishingly small. Heck, lots of old foreign coins are worth exactly nothing because of changes in the currency. Lutzenberger's answer should have reflected that instead of sending readers to a professional grader (a fee of at least $25). It didn't, which is why we grade Tom Lutzenberger a mint-condition Dumbass of the Day.

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was    ehow.com/how_5942705_value-foreign-coins.html

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