Rex

I hate money so much I decided to withdraw all my bank savings in 500 peso bills and shred them to pieces. Before burning them, I decided to take a souvenir photo.

Alright, alright… I got the banknotes - already shredded - from the nearby Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas branch. More than a dozen sacks of them were waiting for disposal but the kind security guards, allowed us to tow away one of them. They said I could use it for school projects. Hahaha..

The sack was heavy, about 30 kilograms. We didn’t have a car but I decided it was worth hiring a taxi just to bring the shreds of wealth home. The curious taxi driver kept asking what was in the sack but we couldn’t give a straight answer. It was an undertaking bordering on lunacy.

I have no figures on how heavy a piece of banknote is, but assuming 5 pieces will weigh 1 gram, 30 kilograms will be 150,000 pieces of banknotes. If all of them were 500 peso bills, I would have taken home 75 million pesos! Too bad they’re shredded.

Also makes me curious how it’s like to work for BSP. How do they know all the bills meant to be shredded are actually shredded? Not that I don’t trust the BSP guys, but it just sounds easy to get away with a bundle or two especially if you’re shredding billions of pesos worth of money.

So what am I going to do with a humongous sack full of torn money? Tape them back together? Make pillows? Sell them? I’ll worry about that later. For now, learn more about shredded money over at my Philippine Money blog.

P.S. Okay, maybe I’ll sell it. I know not too many are as crazy as I am to want to own worthless shreds of currency, but in case you are one of those very few, I can send you some but you will need to pay for freight and packaging cost. Just contact me for details.

Tags: money