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Many people save their change at the end of the day. When they get home, they deposit their coins into a jar or a piggy bank or a similar container. Some people roll their change and deposit it into savings every month. Kris and I let our change jars fill completely before we take them in.
But if you really want to see your savings grow, don’t just save your coins — save your one-dollar bills, too. If you come home with two or three dollar bills at the end of most days, it’s easy to accumulate $10/week (about $500/year). Don’t put your dollar bills into a jar, though; use an envelope.
This is an excellent way to fund a secondary savings account. I use my secondary savings for indulgences like my Nintendo Wii or vacations. This is where I deposit spare change, birthday checks, and garage sale money. Any “found money” goes here. I don’t save a fortune this way, but I do save enough to make a couple of fun purchases every year.
This article is about Money Hacks Tuesday, 15th May 2007 (by J.D. Roth)
May 15th, 2007 at 1:51 pm
One of those, “Now why didn’t I ever think of that!” moments.
May 15th, 2007 at 1:55 pm
Here in Canada $1 and $2 are both coins not bills, so it is easier to think of them as “change”.
May 15th, 2007 at 1:58 pm
My father has a jar at his home that he has labeled “fun money.” He had notices that he rarely got 5 dollar bills as change, so he decided to just save all of them he gets.
Anyway, it’s a great idea.
May 15th, 2007 at 2:04 pm
Great idea! That might also keep you from spending those dollars on drinks or candy. I’ve often wanted a Coke and upon finding only larger bills (5’s…don’t be impressed) in my wallet, I turned away in fear of the onslaught of quarters I’d get as change. Singles are often too convenient, so this could be a great barrier to put in place to avoid spending them.
May 15th, 2007 at 2:12 pm
I echo the “great idea” phrase! This certainly helps motivate saving when you keep it fun. (I want a Nintendo Wii too!)
May 15th, 2007 at 2:13 pm
I’m with Bryce’s dad. My wife and I do not, under any circumstances, spend $5 bills. We also will not make any special requests to avoid them (yes, we have been given change for a $20, when the cashier is out of $10’s, as three $5’s).
Here is the best part - in one year of saving $5’s in addition to change, we have about $14000 in savings! No, folks, that is NOT a typo. The only other items contributing to that balance are ING Direct bonuses and interest. As silly as my wife thought it was when we started, she is sold on the idea now!
May 15th, 2007 at 3:05 pm
As a Canadian, I echo the power of the loonie (Canuckajaweya) and toonie (twocanuckajaweya) coins. A pocket full of them will buy a guilty lunch but a bucket of them will buy a mortgage payment.
May 15th, 2007 at 3:16 pm
I don’t make enough cash purchases for this to work. Nearly everything I buy is paid via credit cards (so I can earn all those points, yeah!). Credit card statements are reviewed every month, and accounts are paid in full every month.
I spend my change by always carrying some coins. Anything but pennies goes toward bus fare. Pennies are used for the occasional cash expenditure. Singles ($1) are used to tip.
Indulgences are planned and paid for via regular savings.
Saving change and small bills just doesn’t work for me. BTW, if you’re saving $500 PER YEAR IN A JAR, where your cash is losing value, you need to re-think your saving plan.
May 15th, 2007 at 3:39 pm
What PoscoGrubb said. If you saved $14,000 a year just by saving $5 bills from your change, then good grief: how much cash did you *spend*?
Collecting bills is a way of tricking yourself into saving. If it works for you, great; but an automatic deposit into a savings account (or a sweep of any end-of-month surplus into a savings account) is much easier…
May 15th, 2007 at 3:40 pm
I must echo the “I don’t use much cash” comment. Still, it’s a good idea because the savings is painless, almost undetectable. Realistically, it’s not necessarily any more effective, but perhaps easier.
May 15th, 2007 at 4:22 pm
When I looked at my savings account at Bank of America, I was shocked! I use their “Keep The Change” program and it adds up fast! Whenever I use my debit card for any purchase, BofA rounds every purchase up to the nearest dollar amount from the actual purchase and deposits the difference in my savings account. For example, if I pay $2.27 for a coffee in the morning, $3.00 is debited from my card with .77 going to my savings. It’s the same principle as the suggestion with the change (which I also do), but the BofA program just takes it into the debit card age. I love it!
May 15th, 2007 at 4:45 pm
I read somewhere, something along the same lines, but it said to put the lowest denomination bill and your coins. When you this becomes a habit, you can put your two lowest denomination bills. It also mentions, though, that when you spend cash, you should always use your largest bill. I did this for a month and saved about $50.
May 15th, 2007 at 4:52 pm
I am in Canada and do this with “toonies” (two dollar coins). I just cashedin 800 bucks worth for spending money for a trip to Italy. The last time I raided it I had enough to fly home to Ireland. Woot!
May 15th, 2007 at 6:46 pm
[...] Rich Slowly says do not just put coins in the piggy bank at the end of the day, but add a couple of dollar bills as well. All the small savings will add [...]
May 15th, 2007 at 7:26 pm
I actually have a lot of $1 (U.S.) coins. For some reason I know a lot of people who have used $20 bills in the old fashioned post office stamp vending machines. If you are one of those people ( or if you used a $5 or anything higher), you know exactly what I’m talking about.
I accidentally gave a cashier a Susan B. the other day when I thought it was a quarter. he caught my mistake. I also have many Sacagewea and a few of the newer Washington “gold” dollars.
May 15th, 2007 at 8:00 pm
I have, on a couple of occasions, paid my rent from my coin jar when my job went sour.
I trim my coins back to roughly $1.00 each evening. This lets me make change through the day so that a $1.05 purchase won’t net me a ton of change. I shed the pennies each day and the silver as it accumulates.
May 15th, 2007 at 9:05 pm
I’m with PoscoGrubb (except for the naughty credit cards! - but good for you for paying them off ea. month). We tightly budget our $, so this wouldn’t really work for us. Coins, yep - great for poker, but bills are precious.
May 15th, 2007 at 9:16 pm
I save my change and all the change the kids leave around in a ziploc bag.
I believe my Credit Union will count and deposit my coin, but I have just found out that CoinStar (which I have avoided in the past due to its steep 9% coin sorting fee)will give you the full amount if you get credit towards a gift certificate of some sort.
I noticed that two of the gift certificates that I would use are itunes and amazon.com.
May 16th, 2007 at 12:21 am
I grew up with my grandfather having jars of coins that my brother and I would sort through and put into those paper sleeves. We then put them into our bank accounts. To this day, I believe my brother has a couple of 2 liters of pennies around in his house. I have a coin sorter and when I get enough rolls like $10 worth, I take them to the bank.
Since I’m out of college now, I did think about saving $1/day. If I had done that x 4 years. I would had approximately $1460 without any interest. Wish I thought about that earlier.
May 16th, 2007 at 9:12 am
Pocket change adds up - I throw it in a jar and recently discovered that the local Coinstar machine will count the coins for free if you put the cash into a gift card. A nice $105.26 Starbucks gift card for my wife on mother’s day.
May 16th, 2007 at 9:42 am
I’m going to second what Bob said. Coinstar is great if you can get the gift card. My last jar of coins netted me 100 dollars for iTunes after only six months. Everything not in the budget is payied with cash, and I have a fix cash budget every month. In the past I’ve gotten money for Amazon.com as well. It really helps as it’s all ‘extra’ money.
May 16th, 2007 at 10:01 am
I’ve never understood this concept of “saving”. If you use your coins or your $1 bills on a regular basis, doesn’t that keep you from hitting the ATM as frequently, thus saving you money?
May 16th, 2007 at 10:08 am
[...] Don’t Just save your quarters – save your dollars, too! [Get Rich Slowly] [...]
May 16th, 2007 at 11:52 am
I just recently graduated from college and this would be a great way for me to put money aside to help pay off a little more of my loan debt each month.
May 16th, 2007 at 12:47 pm
I thought about submitting this to GRS several times under the “money making hobbies” section, but I never did. However, it has to do with saving change.
My primary hobby is metal detecting, and I have been doing it for years. Several years ago, I purchased a nice detector for $550. I have paid for it several times over with just the spare change I have found in parks, fields, schools, and local residential yards. That doesn’t even include the occasional silver coin or piece of gold jewelry I find. My wife still wears a very nice white gold and amethyst ring I found a couple years ago. I found it under an inch of wood chips in a local playground.
I usually have a couple bucks in change after an hour or two of walking around and digging good signals. I do it for fun, not money, but it’s a great hobby that actually pays for itself. My local bank doesn’t charge a fee for coin counting and sorting, so I go deposit my finds there after a couple weeks of detecting, which is usually around 20 bucks or so. Once I get $100 in that account, I move it to a high interest (FNBO right now, but Emigrant in the past) account, where it sits until Christmas, and pays for our presents.
Metal detecting can be boring or exciting, depending on what you enjoy. For me, it’s the small thrill I get of literally digging money our of the ground, even if it is just a penny. They add up!
May 16th, 2007 at 5:52 pm
[...] there are many blogs that discuss personal finance from the bottom up. They talk about Quicken, savings, house hunting, gasoline prices, etc… I find some of it interesting and extremely insightful. [...]
May 17th, 2007 at 1:24 pm
I funded 3 seperate cruises to Bermuda within the last 10 years on change that I had saved(coin only). Once I have enough to book a cruise, I find a friend who wants to go and I book it!
May 20th, 2007 at 6:04 pm
[...] in the drawer of my landing strip. I’ve only recently started saving the singles because of this post from getrichslowly.org. I think that’s about the only way I’m going to get rich. [...]
June 12th, 2007 at 9:35 am
My parents used grocery coupons, and would drop an amount equal to what the coupons had saved them into a big beer stein, then clean it out just before vacation. It was about $400 or so every year.
July 26th, 2007 at 4:29 pm
While I do this and have deposited over $700 in change, I will add a tip and a warning.
1) The tip is to go to the post office and buy stamps with a $20 bill in their stamp machines, you’ll get $1 coins as change which is much easier to save and not use in the U.S. thank a $1 bill.
2) I’ve seen many people who did this who fooled themselves because they’d be out of money all the time and just go to the ATM and get more. They weren’t saving, they were increasing their spending. You need to have a set budget for the week, say $100 and whatever you don’t spend goes into savings and then you take $100 out the next week. By placing your change in the jars daily, you’re lowering your risk of spending all of the $100 and forcing yourself to save.
August 28th, 2007 at 10:37 pm
[...] The financial advice blog Get Rich Slowly advises feeding your piggy not only loose change, but one dollar bills as well, since this can quickly add up to $500/year. Whether you invest it or use it for a special [...]
April 26th, 2009 at 6:02 am
Good advice, Undertrader!
November 29th, 2009 at 9:59 am
For those living in the greater NY area, TD Bank (formerly Commerce Bank) will count your coins for free, even if you’re not a customer!