What Should I Do With My Spare Change?
At the end of the day, do you ever get home and realize you wallet is bulging with spare change? Or maybe you keep your loose change in your pocket all day and dump it out on the table when you get home. We have all been there.
We end up accumulating a pile of spare change that we have no idea what to do with!
As a kid, my parents gave me a glass jug I could dump my money change into from doing chores. Not too much has changed as an adult; I have an old coffee tin I use to dump all my coins into.
The change in the tin has never had an official goal and has always sat around for the right moment.
Should I spend or save my spare change?
Right now the coffee tin is almost full and I am debating how I want to spend it.
I could be smart and put it in savings. To do that, I’d use a site like Acorns. The app rounds up your purchases and invests the change.
Or I could have fun with it! It’s not like I am missing the money from my bank account and it’s visibly absent.
Whenever I have tallied up my coins, I have always counted this money as free, unplanned money that is more like a reward than the money I have been saving.
Over the years, I have used my change for various purposes:
- Rainy day fund
- Spending money while on vacation
- Shopping
- Going out to dinner
I don’t think I have ever spent the extra change on bills and everyday expenses.
If I was smart, I could spend the money on:
- Paying a utility bill
- Towards groceries
- Cash only spending
- Small expenses, like pet food
The bottom line is that it is hard to decide how to spend this money! I don’t really have any guilt about how I choose to spend all this free money.
Until I decide, I think I am going to let it keep filling up my coffee tin.
Related reading:
- 7 Ways to Save $500 Right Now
- 17 Painless Ways to Save Over $300 in 30 Days
- How to Track Your Expenses
- Tips for a No Spend Day or Week or Month
- No Spend Day Tracker
I clear out my purse/wallet occasionally and put the coins in a bowl on my dresser. I used to let them accumulate no matter what, and then use a Coinstar machine when the bowl filled up, but these days I’m more inclined to occasionally scrape the bowl for change that I use to buy coffee (it’s $1.27 a cup at work and I generally hand over a dollar bill and exact change.) I definitely treat it like free/play money and don’t worry about keeping track of it.
I used to use the Coinstar too, but wasn’t liking the 10% rate they kept! I would rather use my change for what you are doing, especially since I have started using cash for a lot of my day to day expenses!
TIP: If your bank has a coin machine, cause your a member, It’ll be FREE!!! Hope this helps?
I accumulate a lot of quarters. I am employed in an airline terminal. The reward for returning carts is a quarter. I can return as many as 100 carts in a month. In 2014 I used quarters to pay for the taxes on my wife’s wedding ring and then became debt free by depositing the coins to pay my car loan faster. It’s 2015 and I am using every $10 roll of quarters to build up a three month emergency fund!
This is amazing and awesome that you do this! This is such a clever idea – good luck with your 2015 goals!