Rediscovered "Wealth"

It was one of those times when you "find" money.  But not quite.

Most of us have been through one of those kind of situations where you find money that wasn't really lost.  stuff like:  You're pulling clothes out of the dryer and you find coins in the bottom.  You pull out your winter coat and wear it for the first time in the fall and find money in one of the pockets.  That kinda stuff.  Not the situation where you do actually find money--like laying in a parking lot or something.

In this case, I knew the money was there--It just wasn't quite spendable.  It was foreign.

Sue and I were talking about travel and this time were on the subject of Italy.  Then we got onto the subject of money.  Then I mentioned that I thought I had some Italian Lira still around somewhere, at least one item of which was in the form of a Gettone coin, which are the strange coins that the Italian phone booths took when I was there in the 70's.  The phone booth coin slots had a shape that required these special coins to operate.  I went to the safe and pulled out a big envelope that I had in there with foreign currency in it.  No Gettone coin, but I did find one piece of Italian Lira paper money.

That really wasn't where this post was going though.  I was just setting up the story.

Inside that envelope I also found a bunch of Turkish Lira.  I counted out the pretty paper notes and had 950 Lira total.  I remember thinking that when I left Turkey I still had this in my wallet and never did get around to exchanging it.  I think it was somewhere around $30 bucks worth at the time.  Anyway, I popped up my currency exchange app on my iPod and entered my 950 under the Turkish Lira.

Whoa... $558!  That was considerably more than it was worth back in the 70's!

Briefly, we discussed how cool that was, what I might do with it, where to exchange it, etc.  Then I noticed something:

The exchange said new Turkish Lira.  Hmm.

I was holding in my hand, old Turkish Lira.  It had been replaced in 2005 by new Turkish Lira.  Apparently their currency had been in constant decline for so long that it was worth less and less as time went on.  When they replaced the old with the new, they did it out of convenience so people didn't have to carry an inch-thick wad of money to the corner store to buy a loaf of bread.  The new Lira was the same as the old Lira, but they had dropped 6 zeroes off of it!

So what is my 950 Lira worth?  If I'm doing the math right... It's worth approximately .0006 dollars.

Like I said:  Easy come, easy go.