If you’re like most people, your pocket change gets tossed in a can or jar. In my case, it goes in a gallon plastic baggie. At some point this all gets taken to the bank for deposit or to turn it into paper money. I’m just curious as to the largest amount people have ever cashed in.
Over the past year, I accumulated about $70. Last year, I decided to liquidate all of the rolls of commemorative quarters I’d collected years ago, and ended up with several hundred dollars. But I know that people often collect coinage for years before converting it to spending money.
We have a souvenir glass and several of my ceramic pots that tend to collect coinage. I’ll take them all to the credit union when they’re mostly full. My best was just over $70, but I have no idea how long it had been accumulating. I rarely use cash, apart from the soda machine at work. Most of the change is from spousal unit.
I have a Mickey Mouse Hat coin bank for nickels and dimes and a quart growler from Ouray Brewery for pennies. They’re good for around $60 when full. I use Coinstar–it redeems the full amount in an Amazon gift code. Sometimes there will be a problem with the machine not being able issue the Amazon redemption slip, and it will issue a full value cash voucher instead.
I throw all my change in a bag and every three years, when it starts to get really heavy, I bring it to the bank and add it to my daughters college savings account. She just turned 13 and I just go to [checks bag] $1423.97. So a bit over a hundred dollars a year. If it makes a difference, I use cash a lot and rarely use coins, specifically so they can accumulate there.
I don’t pay with cash much, although I can’t tell you why. I really do kinda prefer it. As a result I usually don’t have much change lying around. I keep an old chewing gum container (one of those ones that are designed to fit in a car’s cup holder) in my glove box to hold change, but it has mostly pennies in it: larger denomination coins usually end up getting fed to a vending machine at work sooner or later. Each of my boys have one of those coin counting jars from Sharper Image that keeps a running tally of how much $ is in the jar. It’s pretty nifty, but again it wouldn’t do me personally much good.
Chefguy, I’m assuming dollar bills don’t count. However, if they did, there’s a Doper who’s name I won’t share [I hope the story is ok to share since they first shared it here] who keeps any $1 dollar bills they get in change. They don’t deliberately ask for $1 bills or exchange larger denominations out for the smaller ones, just collect the ones that come naturally in change whenever they use cash to buy something. Those $1 bills accumulate in a drawer or somewhere, and when they have $100 worth they sort them by serial number, band them together, and store them. When they shared this story here on the boards everyone was pretty gobsmacked… especially after they revealed that they had been doing it so long they had to get a large rifle safe to collect all the banded stacks of bills.
Now that’s taking “collecting change” to the extreme.
This is something I really find even self checkouts useful for; there’s often no queue, so if it takes me a few minutes to pour my handful of change in, I’m not holding anyone up and I’m not annoying a checkout employee. As a result, I don’t accumulate much any more.
I still have childhood memories of the time my Dad won a suitcase full of coins thrown into the pools at the zoo he worked at, raffled off at the staff Christmas party. We all spent weeks cleaning up change to the point shops would accept it. There was a few £100 in all, which was a decent sum in the '80s, but half of it was so tarnished it was barely recognisable, it took ages to get it usable. shudder
When my son was much younger I got him a piggy bank in the shape of a giant red Crayola crayon that was almost as tall as he was. I got fairly enthusiastic about always throwing my loose change into it through the slot at the pointy end. We eventually emptied it out and rolled everything up. It totaled somewhere around $600, and we took it to the bank to start his first bank account.
I got the idea of creating a little life lesson in saving and investment, and since he was an avid computer gamer, we took the money and put it into whatever odd-lot number of shares it would buy in Electronic Arts. In retrospect I’m not sure how wise that was, because for a while there it looked like it was going to be a life lesson in gambling and loss, but in the longer haul EA did well. By the time he insisted we sell, that piggy bank had netted him several thousand dollars, which must surely be some kind of minor record for net proceeds from a plastic fake crayon. And it was always cool when, every year, he got annual reports from EA informing the child how much money they were making from the parents of gamers like him.
Last year during spring break the son and I collected all the change and turned it in; it was enough to buy him a Nintendo DS. I’ll see how much we have this year.
The recent thread on pennies got me thinking about my sack of pennies. I wondered if I still had it … nope. Coinstarred it. That wasn’t much.
About 6 years ago one of the kids was moving and just handed me a can of coins as a “gift”. Well, I tricked the kid right back. Took it to a Coinstar machine and redeemed them for an Amazon Gift certificate and gave it right back. So there!
Not sure of the amount but decent enough. Maybe over $20.
Apparently the kid didn’t know you could do Coinstar and get the full amount as a gift certificate.
My mother was a cashier a long time ago. She’d trade out silver dollars she got with her bills and save those in a jar for the annual vacation to Reno. Maybe accumulated a few hundred of them at a time. The total value of those dollars over the years would be interesting.
A sibling had a couple long, narrow-necked bottles with a big round base. The only coins that fit were dimes. Just barely. Once full they tried to shake the coins out. Oh, this was going to take a long while. Hammer time. How much is a couple softball+ size balls of (silver) dimes worth?
A friend and her grown daughter started a savings trick where every time you get a $5 bill you put it aside for a special purchase. Finances got a little tight, because she’d suddenly have less cash in her purse than she’d thought, but it was working. Then one day she bought a scone at a bakery that only took cash and had to hand a clerk a $50 bill. She got a stack of nine fivers back.
The clerk apologized for not having any 10s or20s, but was so puzzled at my friend’s reaction. “Ma’m, you seem very… sad? Frustrated?”
I have a ceramic TARDIS bank that I once crammed as full of quarters as I could. Came to just over eighty bucks when I cashed them in.
Pops had about twice that amount when he passed away. A lot of it was in pennies, so yeah, Coinstar got the honor of doing the counting. I didn’t think of finding a bank at the time.
The Big Crow has accounts at a couple of banks. The one right across from us won’t count coins so he goes to the credit union about a mile away. He keeps them in a red Solo cup and takes them in when it’s almost full.
When I went in this last time, the machine rejected two coins. One was a 1945 nickel, which was in remarkably good condition for a 73 year old circulated coin.
