You're going to want to check your change for this...
We can’t keep up with English currency nowadays, with a new five pound note released last year and a brand new pound coin which has been in circulation since March.
Currency news got even crazier when it was announced that there were rare five pound notes in circulation with Jane Austen’s face on - worth a whopping £50,000. Yes, really.
The latest currency news, however, came this week as we discovered that there’s a new rare tender to look out for, and it comes in the form of the £2 coin.
Change Checker noticed a mistake on a small amount of £2 coins released in 2015 – later confirmed by the Royal Mint, making them very valuable to collectors.
The valuable £2 coins are recognisable for a very obvious mistake: the Queen’s head is offset by approximately 150 degrees, essentially making her silhouette upside down.
The Royal Mint has explained that the mistake is almost certainly due to one of the ‘dies working loose and rotating during the striking process,' emphasising that there might well be other coins out there with misalignments too.
The misaligned £2 coins are already said to be one of the rarest Britannia coins ever minted, so are valuable due to the fact that there's so few of them, with Change Checkers estimating less than 3,500 of them in circulation.
There's no word yet on how much one of these rare coins could be worth, but according to Change Checker, it will be a ‘substantial premium’.
Now, Which? has revealed exactly which £2 are most valuable so that we know what coins to look out for. According to the site, the most valuable is the Northern Ireland 2002 Commonwealth Games coin, which is reportedly the rarest one in circulation.
It is currently selling on eBay for around £4o, but if you don't have one then fear not - the most valuable include the Olympic Centenary 2008, King James Bible 2011, and the First World War 2015.
Finding one of the above coins could earn you a little extra cash.
So if you'll excuse us - we're off to hunt through our change.
