 Where does money come from? Where does money come from? You probably see your parents use money a lot. They use money to buy things and your parents probably go to work to get it. We have two types of money in Australia, coins and notes. Coins are made at the Royal Australian Mint and notes are printed by the Reserve Bank of Australia. These notes are made of very thin plastic and they have numbers like 5, 10, 20, 50 and 100 on them. The bigger the number on the note, the more stuff that you and your parents can buy with it. The people at the Reserve Bank of Australia can print pretty much as many of these notes as they want, but they know that if they print too many, something called inflation could happen. I'll tell you what that means. When there are too many notes, people start to spend more and more. Because there's so much money going around, people in shops start charging more for things like food and clothes and toys. Everything starts to get more expensive. That's inflation. Most people keep their money in a bank, which keeps it safe. People can get money out of the bank's ATM using their bank card. You can also use the bank card to pay for things, just like money, but cards are a lot easier to carry around than a lot of money. So these plastic cards are basically the same as plastic money.