I have an interesting experience with an emergency cache I set aside in the late 1970s.
I put about $10,000 in an envelope. It consisted of U.S. dollars, French francs, travelers checks from two different banks in U.S. dollars, and Japanese yen.
With the advent of this current plague, I got the money out.
Several lessons about money and time emerge. It has been roughly 40 years since I created this cache and never looked at it.
In the meantime, the European Union was created and a cross-national currency was created. The French francs were open to conversion for the first ten years of the E.U. That ten years ended in February 2012. I have $5,000 worth of worthless francs.
In the four decades I have held them, travelers checks have been replaced by credit cards as the traveler's universal currency. I use credit cards all over the world, as does everyone else. When I created MasterCard, I had that global currency function in mind. What I hadn't realized about my cache was that ordinary bank branches stopped selling travelers checks sometime in the late 1980s.
When I went to cash my Wells Fargo travelers checks at my regular branch of Wells, no one in the branch knew how to do it. Even after looking at the bank operations manual, no one could figure out how to do it. I drove downtown to the main Wells office. Same problem there.
Fortunately, half the travelers checks were issued by Citibank where I also had an account, An older operations officer at the main Citi office made an effort to figure it out. He took all my Citi and Wells checks for deposit.
The only intelligent part of the cache was the yen which had increased in value. About three times the amount I had bought them for. The dollars were worth 25 cents each based on the original purchasing power.
Draw whatever conclusions you want from my experience. My conclusion is never ignore money, of any sort, set aside for the future. Always re-examine it at regular intervals of not more than five years.