Let me ask you something. Do you keep your change? Or do you consider it a nuisance that you just want to get rid of? I’m totally team “keep your change” and it looks like I’m raising my daughters to be change keepers too. What can I say, I’m my mother’s daughter and she’s the one who taught me that change adds up.
When I was a little girl, my mom had a 5-gallon water jug that we would use to collect our spare change. When the coins reached a certain point, we’d roll them. Then we would go to the bank to exchange the rolls of coins for paper money.
I might be wrong, but as far as I can remember my mother would let me and my brother keep the money. We’d always be so surprised by how much money we ended up with because, like I said, change adds up.
This weekend, we went to one of those Coinstar machines you can feed your change into and walked away with $146 in paper money. FYI, this is not a sponsored post or anything. I’m just telling you what machine we used.
I have to say that the 11.9% fee that Coinstar charges is exorbitant in my opinion. We paid because nowadays we can’t roll the coins ourselves and take them to the bank since we do all our banking online. We could have gotten gift cards for the full amount of our coins, but cash is king.
It’s a fun activity that teaches the girls to save money and be more conscious about spending. Once they each got their cut of the funds, they weren’t eager to spend it at all. They were eager to see how much change we could save up in the future.
Moral of the story: Small change eventually adds up if you keep it.
San Francisco, CA
ALSO READ: Danny Trejo Saves a Child & We Should All Be Like Trejo
I showed you mine, now show me yours.
Share your city/town/suburb/you name it! Think of this as a photography hop that lets you share your part of the world and lets you travel virtually. If you link up, please link back or post the Sundays In My City button either in your post or sidebar to let people know that other bloggers are sharing their communities too. Happy trails!
Let’s travel the world together!
Grab the code from my sidebar.
I have a ceramic bank that looks like a Chinese takeout box that I fill with all my loose change. Once it fills up, I cash it in at my credit union (it has a Coinstar in the lobby). It’s usually a nice chunk of money that I use to treat myself to something special.
That’s great they decided to save it! My kids are definitely spenders, and we continue to work on that over the years. I’ve never visited Coinstar, but I too LOVE change!!
I don’t keep money at the house any more because just about every shop here in New Zealand takes debit/credit cards.
But I do remember some friends in the US that save all their daily change.