Where is the best place to find out what old foreign coins are worth?

Question

Where is the best place to find out what old foreign coins are worth?

Answer 1

depending on the coin, Ebay can be pretty fair way to check what the market on a particular coin is.  Search for the name of the country and perhaps the date on in the coins:world section.  You can find a pretty wide cross section of coins on Ebay.  If you can't find the coin it is either so rare that it only come up for auction a few times a year )or less) or so common that it's not worth anything.  The actual value of the coin will depend on a couple of factors, including the demand for than particular coin, what the coin is made of (gold and silver coins fetch more), and what condition the coin is in (the more worn out a coin is, the less it will fetch.  Also, just because a coin is old doesn't make it inherently worth all that much.

Answer 2

One can use eBay but it is a time consuming process. There are actually no free web sites that have a good system to get values. Most want to sell you something so are retail prices and dealers pay way less. When it comes to world coins at least in the U.S. all one gets is a ball park figure until it is actually sold and you get the money. Most U.S. coins dealers are no help for they usually know little or nothing at all about world coins. I get World Coin News a monthly coin magazine, so I use that as a guide as to what coins are really selling for. I also have the Krause/Mishler Catalogs of World Coins that cover 1601-2007 and they give me a basic idea of the retails which are often to high. If you do not have to many and can give me the country, date and denomination I can ball park them for you. I only do small lists at a time due to it is time consuming. The catalogs are also available at some large library's. You can email me here and I will send the email address to send list if you wish. You can also check to see if there is a world coin dealer near you or a coin club, they could help.

Answer 3

For world coins, it can be a little tough to find prices online.  You can find approximate prices for the more common dates of various types of world coins here:

http://worldcoingallery.com/

To use that guide, find the country your coins are from, then find the denominations and dates.  Look at the photos to identify the coins, and note their Krause Mishler ("KM") catalog numbers.  Then go back to the country page, click the "Click here for Coin Values!" link near the top of that page, and find your coins' values in the table, next to that KM number.  Note that there are sometimes scarcer or otherwise more highly sought after dates that may be worth more than the values in that table, but this will give you a place to start.

For Canadian coins, you might try:

http://www.pcfleet.com/Coinclub/Canada/C...

For British coins, you can find retail prices, denominated in Pounds (multiply by 2 to get the approximate price in US Dollars at current exchange rates):

http://www.tclayton.demon.co.uk/coins.ht...

Note that values for these British coins start at the British grade "Fine", which is for coins that have most of their fine detail present, but wear on high places.

The most comprehensive price guide to world coins is a book: the Standard Catalog of World Coins.  It's available in the reference section of some libraries, and sold at some bookstores.  Note that there are different editions of the book for each century: coins of the1900s (20th Century edition), coins of the 1800s (19th Century edition), etc.

The database that is used for this book is also available for searching and browsing online, but there is a monthly subscription fee; if you have many coins to identify and value, and prefer the convenience of having Internet access to the catalog, that might be an option.  Here's the online version:

http://www.numismaster.com/ta/numis.jsp

For both US and world coins, one valuable source of pricing information are completed auctions on eBay.  If you have an eBay account, you can look up the actual, real-world sales prices of various coins in person-to-person auction transactions there:

http://pages.ebay.com/completedlistings/

Finally, coins are generally worth far more in better condition (unworn, or with relatively little wear, and no major defects) than in worn or damaged condition. Here's a generic guide to grading coins of any country, with some representative photos of each grade:

https://www.therosesworldcoins.com/gradi...