I’ve stolen a 5-gallon bucket (in its previous life it was a conveyance for pickles) from Subway®. I’ve decided to throw all the change I generate into it, and when it fills up, take it to the Coinstar® machine and see how much I’ve got.
As of right now, I’ve got about $21 in there, and I can still see the bottom. The challenge to you Straight Dope math types is to estimate how much money it will hold. Granted, it will be at least a year before I fill it up, but still…
Pertinent Information
[ul]
[li]It’s a 5-gallon bucket.[/li][li]Its diameter is approximately 13 inches.[/li][li]It is approximately 18 inches tall.[/li][li]I expect the distribution of coins to be consistent with the distribution of coins currently circulating in the US economy (translation: it should be a pretty even mix of quarters, dimes, nickels & pennies, relative to the prevalence of such coins in my daily life).[/li][/ul]
My guess is more than $700. I never spend change and keep it in a big 48 oz. pickle jar. When I bring it in three-quarters full it is usually $250-$300. Of course it depends if you have a lot of quarters or if it’s mostly pennies. If you do fill it you’ll have a heck of a time carrying it.
I use a 3-liter jar for the same purpose. I’ve filled it up two or three times now, and it usually comes out to about $300-$350. Let’s see…how many liters in a gallon? 3.785, so 5 gallons equals 18.925 liters, which equals 6.3 of my bottles, so I’d guess between $1892 and $2205. Geek mode off.
I’m going to guess about $2500 based on my experience filling up coffee cans with change. As a word of advice see if you can get your bank to take the change. I seem to remember Coinstar takes a cut of the money. I realize that not all banks will take it but with a 5 gallon bucket full of change the amount you would be losing to the machine could be quite large.
My bank won’t take rolled coins, they have a big change counting machine and I don’t get charged for the service. I try and go when there are no other customers there, I feel silly walking in with a pickle jar full of change. :o
What’s a Coinstar? Is that like those aluminum can recyclers, the Golden Goat?
The cut they take is effing 15%! NEVER use coinstar, what a rip off!
While we’re at it, how many pennies fill a glass 5 gallon water cooler bottle? I got one that’s completely full and am starting on another. My guess is around $300.[sup]00[/sup] worth of pennies.
My latest money jar gets all of my fives, ones and coins. There’s about $600.[sup]00[/sup] in it now plus the coins. I’m going to use it to change my world completely.
At the bank I go to the have a machine similar to Coinstar so you don’t have to roll them all up. I would definitly go to Coinstar if I had to wrape a 5-gallon bucket’s worth of coins.
Coinstar® is this big green machine that they have at Cub Foods, 2900 S. Veteran’s Parkway, Springfield, IL, 6270-something. You pour your coins into it, it counts them, and then it gives you a little voucher to take to a cash register to get your money.
The ones at Cub Foods, at least in this town, take 8.9¢ on the dollar. Which means that, if I really save $2000 :eek: in loose change, Coinstar’s cut will be about $178.
My bank, FTR, won’t count change for you. Instead, they’ll give you a big-ass handful of coin wrappers to wrap your coins in, and then when you bring them back to the bank, they meticulously weigh each wrapper, one at a time, until you’re ready to slap somebody.
If you ask me, Coinstar’s cut is worth the convenience.
rasta, I have a half gallon jug I do this with and last time I took it in, it was worth $348. Yours will deflinately be in the ballpark of $3000, give or take $500. DO NOT do this with Coinstar, you’ll be throwing away your money.
If your bank won’t accept your change, go to a bank that will. Open an account (if only for a few wdays) with a competing bank that will do it for free. Most smaller, regional banks are happy to do this for you. Mine actually lets you feed your money into their machine for free, they don’t have to waste the time to do it, and you don’t have to waste the time with the coin rolls.
Give those banks that actually still value customer service your business, they deserve it.
Well, according to The MegaPenny Project, a cubic foot of pennies totals 49,152 of the li’l Lincolns, or $491.[sup]52[/sup]. Your five-gallon container is precipitously close to 2/3 of that, ergo, you’ll be bringing home $327.[sup]68[/sup] if you roll 'em yourself.
[sub]Damn, Smeg, your Geek Mode goes off? I wish I could do that. Heh heh.[/sub]
You’ll take a lot more than a year to empty your pockets of $2500 in change. You’ll pull the handle off the bucket (or the disks out of your spine) if you try to move it too. I’d be paranoid about sticky-fingered friends grabbing a pound or two of change while you’re taking a leak - who’s gonna notice $30 missing from 400lbs of spare change? But yeah, it’ll be in the thousands for value.
My quarters are used for the washing machine and dryer. (Except for the state quarters and bicentennial ones – they get hoarded because I think they’re neat.) Half-dollars get saved. If vending machines accepted them and they were generall circulated, I would not. Again, I think they’re neat. I got an old dollar coin with my change a couple of weeks ago. I save suzies, since they’re not making them any more. I spend sackies because I want to see them in circulation.
That leaves nickles, dimes and pennies. These go into a glass one-quart milk bottle. (BTW, these are available at the local Vons store and have a $1 deposit.) The first time I filled the bottle with change I got about $70. A later time I got about $45. More pennies the second time. Coinstar® is a ripoff, charging about 9% here. But my time is worth more than their exhorbitant fee.
So if I get about $50/quart, then that would be $200/gallon. Five gallons would be about $1,000. But it depends on the denomination of the coins you’re saving.
Where are the banks that offer free machine counting? None here in East TN to my knowledge – I’ve been taking Coinstar’s 9% and running with it because of the time factor. If I had $2000-3000 worth, a short trip would be cost-effective.
Extrapolating from Omniscient’s experience (which closely parallels my own), $348/half gallon gives us $3480 for 5 gallons. Since I know those buckets actually hold a bit more than 5 gallons, my guess is $3665.23 and I’m very certain it’ll take you more than a year to fill it.