Hi everyone,

I live in an Asian country and sometimes buy euros as an investment. Recently, my parents gave me 1400 euros, but all the banknotes are from the 2002 series.

The breakdown is:

6 × €5

1 × €20

5 × €50

1 × €100

2 × €500

When I went to a currency exchange, they refused to convert them to the new series. I don’t mind holding onto them, but I also don’t want any issues later.

Do you think these first-series (2002) euro banknotes hold any value beyond their face value? Could they be worth more in the future, or should I just try to exchange them?

If they are better exchanged, how can I do it? My local currency exchanges refused, and I tried two or three of them. Any suggestions?


4 comments

  1. Its fiat currency, just slighlty better than your local one. Theres no value there if holding some older series. You are better off buying just gold.

  2. Because the Eurozone is so large and these were issued when cash was still by far the most common payment method, there were literally millions or billions of these notes issued. They have been replaced so it’s rare to find the old series out in the wild, but they are still out there – idk about other people’s families but my grandmother had a few thousand euro stashed away in the old notes which we found last year….

    They are still accepted no problem here in Ireland, and likely will always be at least exchangeable at the central bank.

    Some of the old notes have gone above face value, particularly those from very rare issues. For example if your 500 euro note is an X series, that means it was issued by Germany so as you would expect, a gazillion of them went into circulation and so these are worth only face value. If you have one with a T or a Y serial number, these would have been issued by Ireland and Greece respectively in quite small numbers. As such these can actually go for maybe 1.5x – 2x face value for the 500 EUR.

    So my advice for you is to first look at the serial numbers of the high value notes (50, 100, 500), and check if there are any from the rare series’. There are tables with the serial number letter which corresponds to each country and how many they issued. From here you should get a rough idea about value. If you have rare ones they may actually be worth keeping in cash as an investment, but if you have common ones, the rate of inflation is probably faster than the yearly increase in their value due to rarity and it would probably make sense to exchange them for face value and invest the proceeds into something else.

  3. The 500 notes are difficult to spend; many shops don’t accept them and new ones aren’t issued anymore (they’re still legal tender though). If you have the opportunity I’d exchange them for 100 euro bills.

  4. A euro is a euro. You can still use them. You can also try keeping them for a few years and sell them to collectors. Especially the 500. There were not many of them made so they may end up being worth more than their euro value.

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