Cool. My oldest is an 1864 2-cent piece, found in a pile of old coins I bought for five dollars 45 years ago.
Best ever found in circulation:
Blank penny planchet
1929 Washington Quarter
I received several consecutively numbered newer 2-dollar bills as a tip about 35 years ago.
1929 Washington Quarter
I’m surprised at how many nickels from the 40’s and 50’s are still in circulation. I have one I received in change dated to 1943.
Wheat pennies were uncommon but not hard to find when I was a kid. I still find one once in a great while.
Apparently quarters before 1965 had a high silver content. As they all but vanished from my observation when silver spiked in...1979 or 1980?
Just got a 1929 buffalo nickel a couple months ago for change!
I’ve got a 4 bill, uncut sheet of $2 bills from the treasury from 1980. Somewhere. ;-) Worth anything?
On occasion I see a worn nickel from the 1940s and keep it around for a while. When I was a kid silver dimes used to pop up in circulation, and my folks saved silver dollars that passed into their hands as a savings cache to buy stuff our family lacked (we wuz poor).
If I had the wherewithall, I'd probably have a small collection of ancient coins, like any of the pre-Roman medusa head silver coins from around the Mediterranean, or rare oddities, like one of the dozen or so Sejanus coins known to have survived his damnatio memoriae.