Check your loose change for 2p’s (1983)

April 13, 2008 – 7:29 pm

I was listening today to a radio programme today on BBC radio 4 in the car. They were talking about rare coins that people have found in their loose change that have ended up being valuable.

The first coin they talked about were the 1933 UK pennies. No penny coins were pressed in 1933 because the banks had such high volumes of them there was no need to press any that year. Acoording to the Royal Mint website http://www.royalmint.com/Corporate/Museum/georgeVpenny.aspx 6 (possibly) 7 specimen 1933 penny coins were pressed. The last one that was sold at auction went for over £20′000, so you don’t need to rush to your attic for a rumage because your not going to find one.

They did however give me some hope at the end of the programme - In 1971 when the UK changed from metric to decimal all 2p coins were printed with the word ’new’ on the front.

From 1971 to 1981 all 2p coins were printed with the word ‘new’ on the front, then in 1982 the royal mint decided that they were not really new any more so started pressing them with the word ‘two’ instead. However in 1983 some coins were pressed with the word ‘new’ by mistake and these coins went into collector ‘coin sets’  and not general curculation. According to the programme these coins are rare and you can expect to get around £300 at auction for one and there were a possible 450 pressed.

Now you maybe one of the lucky people to have one and you didn’t know it was valuable so have a look in your attic!

Have you ever found anything rare in your attic? Let us know by leaving a comment.