The $20 Bill and Andrew Jackson
Andrew Jackson has been on the front of the twenty-dollar bill since 1928. Before that, the $20 bill featured different portraits depending on the era. The current design you're holding right now shows Jackson on the obverse and the White House on the reverse. That's the standard note most people encounter at ATMs and cash registers. Here's the part nobody warns you about: there have been multiple redesigns, and not all of them stuck around the way you'd expect. The 2004 series added color to the border and some security features, but the portrait stayed Jackson. Then in 2006, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson announced plans to move Jackson off the bill and put Harriet Tubman in his place. That plan got stalled, then quietly shelved. As of right now, Jackson remains on the $20, and no timeline exists for when or if that changes. I ran into this head-on once when someone brought in a stack of mixed bills from a small business cash drop. Half the register receipts from 2003 through 2009 showed the older green-and-black design, and the rest were the newer color-tinted versions. The bank teller nearly rejected a perfectly valid 2003-series note because it looked "wrong" compared to the current issue. I had to show them the FRN series date on the note and confirm it was still legal tender. It takes about thirty seconds to check, but it comes up more often than you'd think at regional banks that aren't used to handling older series notes.
The security features you should actually care about are the color-shifting numeral in the lower right corner and the security ribbon woven into the paper. The ink shifts from copper to green when you tilt it. If you're handling a lot of these bills, that feature alone cuts verification time down significantly. I've worked with counters where they'd run through a thousand bills an hour manually, and checking for that shift is how they filtered fakes without pulling a machine. Counterfeiters target the $20 because it's the second most counterfeited bill in the US after the $100. The old designs were easier to fake since they lacked color features. The current ones have raised printing you can feel with your fingertips, especially around Jackson's collar and the Federal Reserve seal. Run your thumb along the edge of the portrait. If it feels flat, you're probably looking at a reproduction. One thing most people get wrong about collecting these notes is thinking the series year matters more than the signature combination. A 2003 series with Barnett and Snow signatures is common. A 2006 series with Block and Geithner is also common. What actually moves in the collectible market is low serial numbers, error notes, and the really old series from the 1960s and earlier. The modern notes don't carry much premium unless something goes wrong during printing.
If you want to verify a specific bill, the Federal Reserve Bank website has a note identifier tool where you enter the serial number and series. It tells you the issuing Federal Reserve Bank based on the letter before the serial number. Boston is A, New York is B, Philadelphia is C, and so on through Richmond, Atlanta, Chicago, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Kansas City, Dallas, and San Francisco. That letter also tells you how many notes that Federal Reserve Bank ordered in that series. The Treasury keeps releasing updated designs on a rolling schedule. The $20 hasn't changed fundamentally since the mid-2000s overhaul. No public pressure or official statement indicates Jackson will be removed anytime soon, despite the earlier proposals. The note stays in circulation, and the portrait stays the same.
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