What do you do with your spare change?
Posted
Dec 31 2007, 12:12 PM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
What to do with spare change has been a popular topic here of late, so we thought we'd look into how personal-finance bloggers handle theirs. (None keep enough in jars at home to pay cash for a new truck, like that famous Indiana fellow.) You can tell by the name of his blog that glblguy at Gather Little by Little doesn't eschew spare change. In fact, he wonders "at what point did we as a society make the decision that loose change just isn't worth the trouble?" He and his wife put spare change, and now $1 bills, in a jar, and periodically deposit the money in an emergency fund or pay off debt. Estimated savings over 15 years of marriage: $4,500.
My Money Blog says you can avoid the Coinstar charge by rolling coins yourself or asking your bank to do it, as long as your bank doesn't impose a fee. Some bloggers suggested putting $1 bills instead of coins in a money jar or envelope to avoid coin-counting fees. "If you come home with two or three dollar bills at the end of most days, it's easy to accumulate $10 a week (about $500 a year)," writes our partner blogger, J.D. Roth at Get Rich Slowly. "This is an excellent way to fund a secondary savings account."
