How do you get free coins?

I somehow have the youthful knack of receiving free foreign coins. I once asked at a foreign coin exchange if they had any loose coins around that I might have, and I walked away five minutes later with about 800 grams of free foreign coins that included one silver NZ shilling. My post office also keeps any foreigns for me along with my bank, who have just started giving me their foreign coins. I found an Aussie 50% silver sixpence and shilling in the last bag from them. I was also lucky when an elderly lady decided to just give me three small albums of coins because she was downsizing and didn’t want them any more. They would have been free but I gave her $20 for the silver content in a few of the coins, although she would have been happy to get rid of them for nothing.

So how do you manage to get your hands on free coins.

Its very good, when there are so kind people around You.

Im glad for You, my friend.

Apart from the usual free foreign coins from friends/relatives most people get, my local coin dealer knows about my quest to collect one coin from each issuer; so sometimes when he gets strange issuers in bulk lots he gives them to me for free with a purchase (modern ones like Kazakhstan, Bahamas, etc.) if I don't have the issuer yet.

I just wish he'd do the same with the German/Italian states coins.

Why has no body suggested investing in a balaclava and a Set of lock picks yet?

Quote: "XRY-478"​I somehow have the youthful knack of receiving free foreign coins.

​It's great being our age

Network, the girls at my bank, the gas station, the store and all the guys at my work save me stuff. The gas station gives all there Canadian coins free. I just got a 1999 yesterday.

I still get two to ten free a month. Not bad for a coin they stop making over five years ago. I have to pay for the gold dollar look alike. I got a few Canadian dollars. But last month I got a New Zealand two dollar coin, that somewhere was taken as a US gold dollar,

Not in the best of shape but not bad for a dollar. The guys at work have been good too. One's wife was cleaning and put together a bag of Canadian 1cent ,5, 10 and 25 cents. And gave it to me for a cup of coffee.
Start out saying I can buy all the odd coins you get at the face value it passed at. That way they wont lose anything. But after awhile they may just gave it to you to get rite of that.

Similar with myself, last summer through separate friends/relatives I amassed a couple of hundred pre-decimal pennies, halfpennies etc. with about 3 more jam jars of foreign coins. Most of which were either pre-decimal UK and Ireland, sliver and UK island currency - my favourite being the large Isle of Man Christmas 50p's and pre-decimal channel islands. Last week I amassed around 100 banknotes from relatives that travel quite a bit, mainly modern and 20th Century notes, nothing of great value but of much interest to me. A recent habit of mine has been checking the new Coinstar at Tesco and my success rate is currently a 66% chance of finding coins, great compared to other Coinstars in the area which are yet to yield anything.

Also I found a pound coin on the ground on Friday and swapped it with my friend for a Benjamin Bunny 50p - Technically it was free and each of us benefitted by 50p.

I'm already 40+ years past the time that I could use my youthly enthusiasm and innocence to pocket coins for free. But it did work for me, too, back then.
Nowadays, I sometimes ask colleagues who go abroad for work or holidays to bring some circulation money back for me. I always add that I will refund the costs. Most of the time, they bring some coins along, and don't want anything in return. But when the exchange value of the gift is nevertheless high, I feel endebted, and then I will reward them anyway with a bottle of wine, or I buy them a coffee. That doesn't make the coins free, but it does make great socializing.

I'd say kindness of strangers especially this community members. I'm so glad to meet y'all here.

Also, it's common here for cashiers to leave non-usable coins (foreign coins, old coins, tokens) on top of their register. Hence, me grinning "Can I have those?"

Ah, those beautiful days when as a child I could pocket so many foreign coins for free!

Back then when I had just started my coin collection 6 years ago and when I still kept all 200 of them in a fuzzy pouch, I wrote to the kids section of my local newspaper about my collection and it got featured.
Cue a rush of my relatives offering me their international coins they got from trips abroad.

I still get some people who offer me their coins sometimes, maybe every quarter year or so. And I do find good stuff in there. My friend is going to get me some Russian roubles this Sunday.

But going to the exchange shops and asking for international coins is a great idea to quickly expand my collection. I might try that.

Many of my university colleagues and other friends that travel for work know of my fondness for banknotes and coins. When they travel for conferences I often get their leftovers and some will even look for certain items for me. So far I have gotten freebies from Cambodia, Lao, Vietnam, China, Japan, Myanmar, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Kenya, Australia and England. It seems that for many Thai people foreign money especially coins are seen as trash and so they are happy to add to my collection.