Small Change = Big Bucks
Today I did something I don’t do very often… I got off my ass, and found the bucket I always throw my spare change in.
Personally, I hate carrying change around with me, so whenever I break a bill, everything else goes into the bucket when I get home. This means, when I make a $2 purchase, and pay with a $5 dollar bill, I have 3 bucks or so in change that starts piling up.
The good news is, when I finally counted it all, I have $351. Thats 1/3rd of a rent payment! I’m going to go cash this into the bank, and then throw the money onto my student loan. I figure its a nice way to use up the money that has just been sitting around – literally – collecting dust.
If you hate counting and rolling money like me, some of the Bank of Montreal locations now have change counting machines that are free. These machines save so much time, in that you just dump in your change, it counts it, then issues a receipt that you take to the teller to cash out.
For a very lazy weekend, it turned out to be quite profitable.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
$351, wow!
We cash in our coins once a year. In the past, we’ve used the money to buy something we wanted. But we’ve started using it now for debt payments. It’s such an easy way to get a few hundred extra dollars.
Yeah for sure. I find since I almost NEVER pay with change, theres a good solid portion of being $2, $1, and $0.25 coins, which add up really quickly.
I wish my building had coin laundry, would make life so much easier to use it there.
Congratulations on the total!! I drive through a toll booth quite often, so most of my coins go there. Still, its nicer to get rid of the coins I have than to withdraw cash and break large bills just to pay a 50 cent toll!
That’s awesome! We’re doing this with our change, except we’re saving it for a mattress.
If your bank doesn’t have coin counting, you can use coinstar. If you use it to get a gift certificate, you keep 100% of the money. Amazon gift certs sometimes sell on ebay for higher than facevalue.
When I used coinstar, I chose an Amazon gift cert, but the malfunctioned so it spit out a cash receipt sans the fee.
That’s a nice chunkochange! When I was little my parents would take me to the bank to deposit my savings, the bank we went to had one of those coin counting machines we could look at. Great memories
Bringing change into a bank to this day always reminds me of that.