A good cause fits the bill, or coin

In my living room is a big glass jar full of money I’ve brought back from trips. One coin from New Zealand bears the images of a kiwi bird and a very young Queen Elizabeth II. The Danish 2-kroner coin has a hole in the middle; the scalloped edge of the Hong Kong 20-cent piece makes it easy to recognize. There are lots of Mexican pesos in the jar, made of a metal so insubstantial I’m sure I could bend it with my teeth.

If I separated, counted and converted all these coins and bills, they probably would total less than $50, but as souvenirs, they’re worth much more to me.

Before I got so sentimental about Indian rupees and Italian lire, foreign currency, especially coins, seemed a nuisance -- hard to get familiar with on a visit abroad and even harder to get rid of at the end of a trip. Most currency exchange booths at airports are happy to sell coins to you when you arrive, but they won’t accept them when you try to change your local currency into U.S. money later.

“The general rule of thumb is to spend up your coins as you go along,” says Michael Fahy, regional market director for London-based Travelex Currency Services Inc., which has more than 650 exchange offices in 35 countries. Travelex does buy back coins of certain major currencies, such as 1- and 2-euro pieces. But Fahy says taking back others is not economical because of the time required for sorting and counting and the expense of shipping heavy accumulations of coins to currency processing bureaus.

Bills generally can be converted, but the airport exchange rates for selling back currency are worse than those for buying by 5% to 10%, Fahy says. (Easing this cruel fact of a trip, Travelex’s Buy Back Plus Program assures that travelers can sell currency at the same rate at which they bought it, for an additional service fee. That’s attractive to people who anticipate having lots of foreign currency to reconvert at the end of a trip.)

All of this argues for starting a foreign coin collection or getting rid of every last penny, peso and pfennig you can before heading home. It isn’t easy, though. On the last day of a trip, you have to try to figure out how much local money you’ll need to get to the airport and amuse yourself while waiting for your flight. Will you need to eat, buy magazines, have the right coin on hand for the pay toilet?

I always keep too much, leaving me with coins at the bottom of my purse.

What to do with the spare change? Colin R. Bruce II, senior editor for the numismatic book division of Krause Publications, which publishes such coin collecting reference volumes as the “Standard Catalog of World Coins,” says it’s unlikely travelers will find anything of interest to collectors in the spare foreign change they bring home from trips. Mints here and abroad pump large quantities of new coins into circulation, Bruce says. And even money from exotic places is readily available at foreign currency suppliers, which keeps it from becoming particularly rare and thus valuable.

Instead of looking for treasures in their pockets, most people hit the stores at the airport. If you find a good buy, getting rid of foreign currency this way can be more economical than selling it back. But usually I end up making purchases I don’t really need.

Some people give their spare foreign change to their children, nieces, nephews and grandkids, who like to take it to school for show and tell. I used to paste the coins my mom brought back from her trips abroad on the wide-ruled notebook paper of country reports, which helped me get A’s in social studies.

My clever teenage niece had another idea. Before leaving for a trip to France a few years ago, she emptied my foreign coin jar on the living room carpet. After much sorting, she came up with $20 in French francs to use as walking-around money in Paris. (This was before the introduction of the euro.)

UNICEF has an even better solution. In 1987, a pilot suggested that the United Nations agency for children solicit spare foreign currency from travelers on international flights before landing. About a dozen airlines, including American, British Airways and Qantas, and Travelex bureaus participate in the program, which has raised $44 million for needy children around the world since its inauguration.

Handing out UNICEF envelopes at the end of a flight is an elegant idea, when you consider that $72 million in foreign coins and low-denomination bills is forfeited each year by travelers and that $2 can buy 66 pencils for young scholars or oral rehydration salts for 40 children, according to UNICEF.

Simone Clarke of UNICEF says surprising things have been found in these Change for Good envelopes: two wedding rings (one man’s, one woman’s), a valuable 1850 Napoleon coin and a check for $25,000.

Change for Good got much more lucrative for UNICEF in 2002, when 12 European countries -- Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain -- adopted the euro, rendering their old currencies unusable. A European Union provision that allows charitable institutions to continue exchanging extinct currencies means that people can still put their French francs, Italian lire and German marks to good use, by contributing them to UNICEF.

I’ll go through my jar again for UNICEF. But parting with treasures will be hard because some of the defunct European coins and bills I have are so beautiful they make U.S. currency look boring by comparison.