Right now it is about $10 since I’m running low on laundry money. I never use cash, so I’m stopping in to buy rolls of quarters fairly often since my apartment’s laundry machines are coin only.
The other change is usually brought back from Las Vegas. Although the machines themselves don’t take coins, the ticket machines give you change.
When the change adds up, I’ll take it to Coinstar and convert it to Amazon. I buy frequently as well as sell on Amazon so the change is put to good use.
Those of you who count and wrap your own coins – will the bank take them that way? How do they know your coin rolls are accurately counted, or aren’t full of slugs or foreign coins? If they take them and put them into their own coin-counting machine, that’s wasted effort for you.
And you all know you can get a coin sorter wallet like this, right?
Banks usually require people to put their name and account number on the coin wrappers. And I know that some banks used to weigh the rolls of coins. Sure, some people slipped slugs into the wrapper, but that’s what the account number is for, to track down the jokers who do this.
The coin sorter wallet would be useful if the US had coins that were actually worth something. Back when I was a kid, I had a wallet like that, and I could slide out a nickel or dime and actually use it to buy something. Nowadays, I carry a small change purse that’s filled with quarters, in case I need to buy something from a vending machine that doesn’t take bills. All the other coins usually get tossed into the wine bottle when I take off my clothes*. Even a newspaper will cost me at least a buck, and it’s more likely going to be two bucks. So that’s four or six or eight quarters…and it looks like that sorter only holds half a dozen or so coins in each slot. So the sorter is good for ONE transaction, as a rule. It might be handy to hold a few coins if you want to hold up the line while you dig out the wallet, and then dig the coins out of the slots. I don’t like to hold up the line like that.
*I usually wear a patio dress with pockets in it. I pay with bills, and I put the coins in my right pocket. When I take off the dress, I put the quarters in my coin purse, and the other coins into the wine jug.
To those who ask if coin savers don’t think coins are money, it’s not that we don’t. It’s just a fact that any amount of change over a dollar or two is not something you can use as a convenient medium of exchange. The fact that people willingly pay nearly a dime to the dollar to have larger amounts of change reconstituted as “real” money tells us that, for those people, five bucks in change is really only worth about $4.50.
Although such change does eventually get returned to the system, while it languishes in people’s jars and ash trays it almost seems to stand Gresham’s Law on its head. Instead of bad money driving out the good, good money drives out the bad. People hang on to the $5 in change, which is, in a way, worth less than $5, and prefer to spend a $5 bill when actually buying something.
Currently it’s between $10 and $50, but only because I recently did a sweep-and-use. It’s been in the hundreds. I collect it for awhile, then feel like a big shot.
Less than ten bucks of spare change, I’d estimate. I put loose coins in a cleaned-out old peanut butter jar when I get home each day. When the jar fills up, I sort it, put it in paper wrappers and take it to the bank for cash. My sons like helping out with the sorter machine.
I remember being amazed as a kid when my (rather wealthier) cousins would throw out spare change. It just wasn’t worth it to them to gather and sort it. Yeesh.
So what was the closest guess, and how much cash did you actually get back? 
I probably underestimated. My dad has a bunch of pill bottles filled with quarters, plus a bank that he drops his change into. That gets taken to the bank every few years. I have a bank that I drop my coins into and it’s got about ten or fifteen dollars in coins and less than ten dollars in cash (I forget I have cash in my wallet since I always pay with a card). At some point I’ll spend some of it.
Anybody else find counting stacks of coins kind of fun?
Oh, I don’t remember what the closest guess was anymore. The final tally was a little over $1200, which I just had the teller deposit into my savings account.
I TAKE my change to coin star when the jar is full, about once a month.
(Bring and take usage is a pet peeve)
Another Coin Star user. I don’t understand it. Why not just take your change to the bank and save the fee Coin Star charges?
I take my change to the coin star at my bank. (actually, a credit union.) They don’t charge a fee.
When I used a commercial bank, they charged a fee to turn in coins. That was part of the reason I switched to a credit union.
Hmm. More than 20 years ago I was temporarily living in Nashua, N.H. and briefly had a bank account there. That bank had a very cool coin-weighing and -sorting machine - you could pour in just about any amount and it would go clinkclinkclink and figure it all out and tell you, to the penny, how much you were owed. Pretty neat. I’ve never seen a machine like that since then.
I’ve never used Coinstar; I don’t think I’ve ever even seen a Coinstar branch or machine. My current bank requires you to submit coins in paper rolls, but doesn’t require that you put your name and address on each.
What you describe is coin star.
We have 4 large jars. One holds big coins (Canadian $1 and $2 coins); another holds already rolled coins (5, 10, 25 cent pieces); another an unsorted mish-mash of coins; and the 4th is the “found in the laundry” jar. My husband empties his pockets into the two jars each evening (the big coins and unsorted), and I take out what I want to spend for sundries each morning. I’ll have about $20 in coins in my purse at any given moment.
Once or twice a year I sort and roll and lug what I can carry into the bank. What I can’t lug ends up in the aforementioned jar of rolled coins to be taken in next time. It is not unusual for me to take in more than $1,000 in a year.
We use that “extra” cash to buy something fun or to take a small trip. It doesn’t make any interest, it’s true, but it also doesn’t get spent on anything but “whimsy”. It’s just a fun thing for us and amazing how much money can accumulate and not be missed.
I like CoinStar. At the machine in my grocery store there is never a line (there is at the bank). Additionally, the machine is fun to use, and I feel the fee is fair.
When our change jar is full, we trade it in for Amazon.com gift cards from Coinstar. We are always getting something or other from Amazon.
I have $9.25 in ‘spare’ change. All quarters. All “Connecticut” quarters.
Hey, I just think that is the prettiest of the US coins, and can’t bring myself to spend them.
All other coins go into my change purse and I gradually spend them. Sometimes, when they’ve built up, I deliberate go through a self-checkout in the supermarket just so I can feed a whole pile of coins into it without annoying anyone.
A lot of the banks, at least around here, won’t take coins. Or charge a similar fee as CoinStar.
$127, as it turns out. Not counting the ~$450 worth of (real) silver dollars I forgot I had. I was hoping for an Amazon gift card, but had to make do with Starbucks. It’ll probably take me as long to spend that as it did to collect the coins in the first place :).