Have you managed to get your grubby hands on one of those brand new plastic fivers in the last week? Don't go paying for a pizza with it just yet.
The
polymer £5 notes have been lauded for putting up a much better fight against dirt and the washing machine, not to mention the fact that they're near-indestructible.
But none of that is of interest to the collectors offering north of £200 on eBay for just the one of these bad boys.
You don't need to spend your free time listening to unintelligible jibberish in an auction room to know that the very first editions of anything new will accumulate in value
massively as the years roll by.
If you've got a new fiver that has a serial number beginning with 'AA01' it means it was one of the first 999,999 to be printed. It's thought that the Queen has been given AA01 000001 - fair enough, she is on it - but the others are highly sought after.
In truth, put one of these notes somewhere safe now and it could be worth an absolute fortune one day, but if you can't resist (literally) cashing in now, a considerable profit awaits.
We had a quick browse of eBay and immediately found one of the polymer fivers with the AA01 prefix selling for £142 which, let's face it, is quite a good rate of exchange.
Then we scrolled a bit further and found one resting on a bid of £175. Again, the seller was playing up that rare serial number.
And that's not even the pinnacle of the big-spending money collectors.
The Liverpool Echo came across a winning bid of £227.
Best get digging through your wallet. Who said you couldn't do a whole Saturday night out on a fiver?
