The Humble Piggy Bank, Revisited
Save That Small Change!
Little Numbers Combine to Make Big Numbers
These days, it seems like everyone is strapped for cash. The pandemic didn’t help, but even before that, ever since things went to hell around 2008, nobody has two pennies to rub together. My personal income took a bit of a dip around then, too. There are things you can do to save money, and even find money from non-obvious sources.
I used to live in the city of Seattle. Seattle is not now what it was, but it was and is very expensive. When you are struggling to meet rent and just can’t seem to kick that eating habit, pennies count. I started squirreling away our spare change. Every day, my wife and I would come home with loose change, the leftovers of a day’s worth of incidental purchases.
I would keep the change in a quart-size food container that originally contained yogurt. Greek honey yogurt, as I recall. I just washed out the container, cut a slot in the top, and started saving all our spare change every day. About every three months, that container would be full, and I would dump the contents into a quart-size Ziploc bag and set it aside. A couple of times a year, I would run those bags of change to a Coinstar machine or some similar service and exchange them for an Amazon gift card. Banks used to let you bring in loose change, but most have discontinued that service. No idea why.
The trick to using Coinstar is to request payment as a gift card. They will allow you to take cash for your coins, but when you do that, there is a surcharge. If you take a gift card, there is no surcharge; you get the full value of your change. I always took an Amazon gift card, because I tend to order so many of life’s little necessities from Amazon. I found that, on average, every time I filled that old yogurt box with assorted change, it was typically worth about US$125. Do that four times a year, averaging filling the box every three months, and that comes to US$500 a year, just in spare change.
After getting used to saving the spare change every day, I decided to take it a step further. I started setting aside not just the coins, but also any one-dollar bills. The funny thing about really small bills is they never seem like much. If you have a couple of dollar bills in your pocket, it is so easy to blow them on incidentals and not have any real accounting for where they have gone.
When my wife and I would get home from work, I would lay claim to all the loose change and all the US$1 bills. The change went into the yogurt box, and the bills went into an old cookie tin I had left over from the holidays. I would keep a close accounting of the dollar bills, and when I had one hundred of them, I would bind them together with rubber bands. When I had a few hundred dollars saved, I would go deposit them in the bank. I averaged around US$80 per month in savings just on the dollar bills. That brought the total annual savings to US$960 + US$500 = US$1460. Almost fifteen hundred dollars a year, gleaned from that loose change and small bills that most people don’t even bother accounting for.
This also helped attenuate frivolous spending, because while we might think nothing of impulsively spending a dollar or less, we tend to stop and think when considering breaking a five-dollar bill or some larger denomination. This kind of piggy-bank approach to saving is something a lot of us learn when we are kids, but we tend to forget when we get older. Hope this helps!
