Where do you redeem old US money?

Answer 1

More information is needed. Are you referring to coins or bills? By "old", are you referring to items from the 1950s or the 19th century?

You'll first have to determine whether what you have is worth more for its collector value or, if they're coins, for their metal value. The only way to do that is to have them appraised by a dealer or someone else who is trained to know the difference. The age of a coin or bill doesn't always correlate with its value - some very old coins aren't worth much, and some relatively new ones are very expensive.

Then you'll have to decide how you want to handle the sale. If what you have appears to be worth more than face value, you should get a couple of competing estimates to make sure what you're being offered is a fair price. You have to accept the fact that a dealer will pay wholesale, which might be half or 2/3 of the price shown in a retail price guide. Alternately you could try to sell the items via eBay or a similar site; you could get more for them but you have the hassle of selling them individually and assuming payment risk.

The absolute worst thing to do is to give up and just go to a bank, or even more expensively, one of those coin-counting machines like you see in supermarkets. Banks will only give you face value, and those machines actually steal money by keeping 9 or 10 cents of every dollar you put in as a "service fee". Either way, you could lose big time. I have heard any number of Horror stories of people who took a bag of "dirty old pennies" or whatever to a bank and got face value for them, then the tellers went through and skimmed out the collectible coins for a nice profit.