Check any new £10 notes you get - some could make you £80,000

We, as a nation, are a little bit obsessed with the idea of our old junk being worth huge amounts of cash.

Antiques Roadshow – the second most boring television show ever made, after Songs of Praise – has been on air for seventeen thousand years now, and at school, you probably had that rumour go around that particular Beanie Babies could be worth hundreds (they never were).

But one thing that’s even more satisfying than your old junk being worth loads of money, is your money being worth loads of money. You can literally sell your money for more money – as long as you can find the right coins and notes.

Everyone got very excited earlier in the year when it turned out a bunch of the new fivers could bring in the big bucks, and now the same looks set to happen with the new polymer £10 notes – which come into circulation this Thursday, 14 September.

The new note features novelist Jane Austen, and the good folks at ChangeChecker.org have put together a helpful guide of things you need to look out for if you fancy catching yourself a very lucky bit of extra dough.

The ones to keep your eye on early doors are – like with the £5 notes – any which have a serial number beginning with AA. AA01 notes will be particularly sought after, as these are the very first to be printed. They could make you hundreds – maybe more – if you can sell to the right collector.

Other AA notes will not be as valuable, but can still make you money. ChangeChecker explain: “The rest of the AA prefix notes will be interesting to collectors but not necessarily worth a huge amount, although that said, some £5 notes did sell for around £20 last year – four times their face value.”

Other serial numbers to look out for will come a little later in the run, and mostly relate to Austen. For instance JA01 notes, JA75 (her birth year) and JA17 (the year of her death) will likely all be popular.

ChangeChecker also add:

• Serial numbers 16 121775 and 18 071817 would represent the author’s date of birth and death respectively.
• Serial number 17 751817 would be her birth and death year combined.
• And true Jane Austen fanatics would know that Serial number 28 011813 is the date that Jane Austen’s most celebrated novel, Pride and Prejudice, was first published.

So keep your eyes peeled for those.

But perhaps the best notes to look out for early on? Any which have the serial number AK47, like the gun, weirdly. Someone managed to sell one of the new fivers with this code on for £80,000 in July. Eighty thousand. I have no idea who’s paying that much for a £5 note, but if they’re buying from me then there’s no way I’m going to complain.

Serial numbers with James Bond’s 007 in will also make you good money.

There is no set value for any of these notes – they are worth as much as the collector sees fit, so if you do stumble across one of these mini goldmines, make sure you sell it to the right person.

As ChangeChecker say: “An early serial numbered £10 note will be a genuine piece of the country’s history. It’s likely the bank of England will hold another auction of early editions, so if you have the disposable income, why not?!

“However, when the polymer £5 note was released we saw a collecting frenzy. The prices people were paying (and demanding) for some of the early notes was vastly inflated and in some cases ridiculous.”

Good luck out there.

(Images: Rex)