World Paper Money Storage Suggestions

Welcome to the hobby! It's a great deal of fun, no doubt about it.

A little advice :

1.) Consider your lifetime collection storage expense, as noted above. Expensive albums and displays have little or no resale value, it's a sunken cost.
2.) Consider the purpose of your collection. Are you just having some fun getting a bunch of cheap notes? Do you kinda sorta plan on 'investing'? What are your goals?
3.) Consider a theme for your collection. Women on notes, ships, Europe, Africa, monarchs, etc., etc.
4.) Realize that after about 1,000 notes, your expenses are going to rise.
5.) Some basic rules : Quality over quantity, cheap once is cheap twice, and condition, condition, condition.
6.) Enjoy whatever you decide to do, and recognize your collection will evolve and change over time. I'm still collecting much worldwide material, but Latin America is now of no interest. Neither is Vietnam or Bangladesh, the notes are bland and of little value.

@pax...excellent guidelines.

I would say, that on your #1 point, even though storage is a sunken cost, it's critical to the success of any serious collection.

Now, back to the subject. One thing I have noticed lately is that several world paper money dealers have gone exclusively to the 5x8 holders, regardless of note size. I asked about this and received same answer: "easier to store just one size". Also, if you're buying 5,000 at a time or even more; the price is significantly lower per each.

Hello All, Great advice there. A naive question here but, do you also put a sticker onto the mylar giving details of pick number, where bought, price, grade quoted, grade agreed with? etc etc. Just thinking that some notes would need more info than others and maybe spoiling the initial look of the holder.
Thanks Paul

@pcuk, if you want to add a peelable label to your sleeve, go ahead, but I don't do that, it just costs money and takes time to fill out. I don't want to detract from the note in the sleeve, and all the information goes into my collection spreadsheet. No point in redundancy, I figure.

Unless the labels are peelable, you have to scratch off the residue if you want to re-use the sleeve for a different note.

Good information given the wide array of world not sizes.

Label or not to Label?
Mine are small and simple

World notes (not U.S.):
Country on first line
Pick # on second line

U.S. notes:
Type* and Friedberg Number** on first line
Date and $ value on second line
* Type = LT - Legal Tender
SC - Silver Certificate
FRN - Federal Reserve Note
FRNB - Federal Reserve Bank Note
obs - obsolete currency
mpc - military payment currency
and so forth

** Friedberg number (Fr. xxxx) OR other references such as Criswell (Cr#)

So, another option is albums. For a couple of the countries that I have a lot of notes for and really want to display easily, I use 3-pocket binder sheets in a Lighthouse binder with slipcase. They look great on the shelf and are super easy to flip through. You probably wouldn't want to do that with all your notes, but it's nice for the ones you like looking at frequently.

Note: this is a relatively expensive option when compared to sleeves and a currency storage box, which work just as well if not better for archival purposes.

When you get a few more posts, gaman, think about selling some of those Barr stars on CCF!