People That Collect Credit Cards

If a good friend told you that he was collecting credit cards, what would you think? Most people would assume that their friend meant that he had applied for too many credit cards over the years and that he now has a decent-sized collection of cards to deal with. That’s what a collection of credit cards often refers to. However, that might not be what your friend is talking about at all. Did you know that there are people out there who collect credit cards as a hobby, much in the same way that others collect coins or stamps or baseball cards?  The majority of people who collect credit cards are people who are interested in the study of money (which is called exonumia) and who previously collected other exonumic types. Many of these exonumists began their collections as numismatists (coin collectors) and then grew their collections to include different types of money such as credit cards. There is a whole hobby built up around the collection of credit cards now and it’s one that you might want to make yourself aware of because it could mean that your expired credit cards are worth some money.

You might not realize it but credit cards didn’t always look the way that they do now. When credit cards were first created they were made of a type of celluloid plastic that is no longer in use in credit card manufacturing today. Throughout the years credit cards have been made of a variety of different materials including metal, fiber, paper and modern-day plastic. Credit cards have also had various shapes (including that of metal tokens) and sizes over the years. People who are interested in collecting credit cards will be interested in older and rarer credit cards.

If you do an online search for “vintage credit cards” you will be able to get an idea of the different types of credit cards that were created over the years and which are now appealing to collectors. Older coin-shaped credit cards are going to be the most popular but also the hardest to come by (and the most expensive for collectors to get their hands on!) Credit cards that are popular in the collector’s market also include limited-edition credit cards that were specially released for different promotional reasons over time.

These days there are all sorts of different credit cards being manufactured. The size, shape and material of many of these credit cards is the same. However the design on each of them can differ dramatically. As times goes on, some of today’s modern plastic credit cards might end up becoming valuable if the design is a rare design that catches the attention of people who collect credit cards. This could mean that you may want to avoid just cutting up and throwing away your expired credit cards; it might turn out that there is value to them in the future! Who knew that your credit card might actually be able to make you some money one day?!

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 5th, 2008 at 6:09 pm and is filed under Credit Card News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.