What currency is the best deal by weight?

August 11, 2005 12:44 PM

What currency is the best deal by weight?

Ok.. so I think for US currency, the penny (1 cent) is the best deal at 2.5 grams.. So that works out to $1.51 a pound. Bills are a much worse deal US $1 bills are about $490 per pound.

So -- my question is... what currency out there is the best deal by weight? It'd probably have to be modern currencies, since any old or collectible currency would probably be worth more than the actual currency.. For example, I've been looking around and an Iranian 2-rial coin (at an exchange rate of 8,998 rials to 1 USD) is selling for $2.50....

posted by dty1 to work & money (13 answers total)

Oops.. my math was wrong.. that's $1.81 per pound for the pennies.. :-)
posted by dty1 at 12:48 PM on August 11, 2005

So, just to clarify, we're talking about "If I had 10 pounds and I wanted to put the most currency value into it, which currency should I use", and not "The non-currency value of the metals in coins are more expensive in such and such country, where they use gold, as opposed to the US, where we use zinc inside our pennies". Right???
posted by michaelkuznet at 12:52 PM on August 11, 2005

Best deal, as in getting the most weight per dollar, or most dollars by weight?
posted by zsazsa at 1:01 PM on August 11, 2005

Most weight per dollar.. the value of the metals aren't weren't what I was wondering, though maybe that's neat to figure out too.. I just want to get the most mass of currency for my money...

Ie, if I wanted to fill my sock full of _____ I want to minimize my cost and maximize the weight for that endeavour. Theoretically speaking of course.
posted by dty1 at 1:05 PM on August 11, 2005

Costa Rica might be in the running. You can get 100 of their big, heavy 5 colones coins for a dollar.
posted by Nothing at 1:13 PM on August 11, 2005

Isn't this actually asking for the WORST deal by weight, then? The least amount of money per pound? I'm so confused.
posted by Justinian at 1:20 PM on August 11, 2005

I can't find their exact weight, but they're about the size of a US nickel. I remembered them being bigger, but I guess I was thinking of the 100 and 500 Colon coins.
posted by Nothing at 1:21 PM on August 11, 2005

My best guess is the Trinidad and Tobago penny. 625 of them to one United States dollar. They look penny size, but their central bank page doesn't even have the weight.

I got sick of looking them up though on wikipedia. You have to find one that still has a small coin but also has a high exchange rate. Most places that have 2000 to 1 exchange rates don't have sub-unit coins at all.
posted by smackfu at 1:23 PM on August 11, 2005

Ecuadorian sucres, which are no longer made (or at least, Ecuador has adopted the USD as the official currency) could be a good one. They stopped making coins ages ago (when they weren't worth the metal they were made of). When I was there 10 years ago (and the sucre was at 2800 to the dollar), you could get jewelry made of sucre coins for quite cheap. Which leads me to thing that buying 'em by the pound would be pretty affordable, though tracking them down these days might be tricky.
posted by nickmark at 1:53 PM on August 11, 2005

I'd guess Turkish Lira. Inflation in Turkey is something insane, and you can often buy loads of older coins that just aren't worth carrying around from market stalls.
posted by pompomtom at 3:13 PM on August 11, 2005

> Isn't this actually asking for the WORST deal by weight,
> then? The least amount of money per pound? I'm
> so confused.

That's like saying finding the biggest tv for the least amount of money would be the worst deal on TVs.
posted by null terminated at 3:44 PM on August 11, 2005

Unless weight is itself the value that you're going for, in which case buying some water would make a lot more sense, the sensible way to define the best deal would be the incarnation of currency whose market value outweighs its face value by the widest margin. For that, I can't think of anything that would beat gold coins such as the Krugerrand, which sells for $463.74 retail today, weighs about an ounce, and has a face value of 10 rand, or US$1.5793.

To answer the actual question though, Zimbabwe is one place where inflation has done some work. Maybe not as much as the old Turkish Lira, but small-denomination Lira are probably very rare by now, as people have been burning them for warmth or whatever for quite a while, and they did replace the old notes with new ones worth a million times less or something. So I look at Zimbabwe, where the inflation is more recent and therefore maybe some low-denomination notes and coins are still around. One US dollar will buy you 18003 Zimbabwe Dollars today, according to Yahoo finance. Zimbabwe has, apparently, a 1-cent coin, though I suspect they probably aren't minting any at the moment. However, since the question implies that currency value should be considered at market value rather than face value, and the value of the metal in the coins far outweighs their face value, I would bet that the paper money would be a "better" deal. Alas, the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe doesn't tell us how much their dollar bills weigh. To take a wild guess and say they weigh the same as an American dollar, that would be 0.03 ounces, according to google. That works out to about 3 US cents per pound.
posted by sfenders at 7:14 PM on August 11, 2005

Ah, I'm not really sure about the face value of the Krugerrand there. This wikipedia article which is the first result on google says 10 rand, or at least there's a chart that looks that way, but other sources say no face value. Oh well.
posted by sfenders at 7:19 PM on August 11, 2005