title: Currency formatting in Python, but keeping as a number
body: <p>I was wondering whether it was possible to format numbers as currency in a easy way, and the following question helped me a lot: <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/320929/currency-formatting-in-python">Currency Formatting in Python</a>.</p>
  
  <p>I did it, and worked fine. But it transformed my data in strings, which is not what I want.</p>
  
  <p>Suppose I want to sum all my items in a pd.Series to return a total amount of money: it will return a string concatenation of all my data, not a number.</p>
  
  <p>How can I cast my values back to numbers, but with the formatting? Is it possible?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks in advance.</p>