I spent this afternoon rolling change. While I do occasionally add money to my online savings account normally my change just gets stashed or added to the checking account.
I’ve decided to stop that practice and open a passport savings account at my local bank. I can link the account to my checking account for the emergency occasion of an overdraft while still earning money on my change.
Anyhow, I gathered up my change and started rolling. Ended up with $35.97—an amount I am delighted with. It takes $25 to open a passport savings account so I have that and some to spare!
I plan to allow my change to accumulate there and when it gets too large I will swap it over into my online savings account so that it can accrue more interest. It may not be a simple method but it works for me. It is definitely easier than hiding money from myself in my checking account—too much of a temptation when it is in there!
When I looked at all of that change I thought about taking it to the CoinStar machine at my local Wal-Mart. Fortunately I googled the device before I did. Those devices charge you 9.8 cents for every single dollar they count—that is like a 10% fee just for counting the stupid stuff! Had I went to the machine I would have been forced to pay $3.53 cents just so that machine could count my money! I like that $3.53 just fine in my pocket, thank you very much, so I rolled the coins myself!
My bank gives out the coin wrappers as a courtesy to customers so they cost absolutely nothing.. and time is cheap compared to money!
We have become so lazy that we will give a whopping 9.8% to a machine just to count our change! We are paying almost $10.00 ($9.80) out for every hundred dollars that machine counts!
What pisses me off is that I almost didn’t consider the fact that there would be a fee! I’m sorry, but for a lot of people ten bucks is an hour’s wage and for a restaurant worker making minimum wage that is almost an hour at time and a half!
Sigh.
I placed my teapot back in its’ place leaving some change and a couple of dollar bills within for seed. When I was a child my father taught me to never completely empty a piggy bank cause you needed “seed” to make the money “grow.” Silly perhaps but I never completely empty the thing—in honor of Father’s memory.
Other than that I paid the tags on the van and renewed my drivers license, which means I’m good to go for another year on that front. Tomorrow bright and early I will be at the bank making some poor teller miserable as she verifies all of this rolled change and sets up that savings account!
What do you do with YOUR change? Do you spend it? Occasionally I spend the quarters but rarely touch the rest. Until tomorrow it was added to the slush fund in my checking account for lack of a better place to deposit it. I like the thought of it making money muchbetter!