Texan's trek north to cash in Canadian coins acquired at auction pays off
Arizona Coin Collector
http://www.canadaeast.com/rss/article/493331
Texan's trek north to cash in Canadian coins acquired at auction pays off
Lauren La Rose, THE CANADIAN PRESS
Published Wednesday November 26th, 2008
TORONTO - A Texas man's cross-border trek to cash in
a large number of Canadian coins acquired at auction
has paid off with a tidy sum just in time for the
holidays.
Michael Lay crossed the border with 42 bags of
assorted Canadian coins worth $4,211 that he
cashed in at a Coinstar Centre in a Hamilton
supermarket Tuesday.
The machine accepts loose, unsorted change without
having to be wrapped or rolled, and provides a
voucher for value of the change which can be
converted to cash or applied to in-store
purchases, said Coinstar spokeswoman Marci
Maule.
Maule said Lay had called the company's customer
service department and mentioned he was going to
Connecticut to visit his daughter, who attends
Yale Law School, and was thinking of heading
to Canada to cash in the coins.
As a collector, Lay said he is interested in
foreign and collectible coins, but admits he
took a chance buying the bags at a Houston
auction not knowing exactly what the
contents were.
The coins he purchased originally came from a
Houston-area bus company, which over the years
had collected them from passengers who had
used them as bus fare. The problem was the
coins were either no longer in circulation or
weren't legal tender in the U.S.
Along with the large amount of Canadian coins,
the collection included a rare two-cent coin
from the U.S. Civil War era, several 1930s
Canadian nickels, a liberty head half-dollar
piece and several Chuck E. Cheese restaurant
tokens.
"I did get a whole lot of junk pieces, tokens,
some things I had never heard of ... but
there were a lot of good things in there,"
Lay said in a phone interview Wednesday at a
car dealership in New Haven, Conn., where
his daughter's car was being repaired.
"I feel like I've at least doubled the money
that we spent at the auction."
This isn't the first time the coin bags, which
Lay acquired in 2006, have yielded rich rewards.
Last year, he sent a friend returning home to
Canada for the holidays with $1,250 in Canadian
quarters to cash them in.
While banks that handle international currency
are happy to accept paper money, Lay said none
of them would deal with foreign coins. That was
the big problem for the bus company, and the
reason they put the coins up for auction in the
first place, he explained.
Lay, vice-president of information technology for
a global manufacturing company, is a longtime
coin collector, a hobby he first took up a
half-century ago.
While attending college in the 1970s, he once
sold his collection to help cover his tuition
costs when he fell short one semester.
The 57-year-old said he plans to hang onto the
rare Civil War-era and older Canadian coins for
now, but didn't rule out the possibility of
auctioning them off down the road.
As for the money he cashed in Canada, he plans
to use some of it for holiday spending and
helping out his family.
"With our daughter going to law school, she's
always needing a hand with this or that - like
the car repair for today," Lay said, chuckling.
..