Most banks have the big change machines for customer use now, and don’t charge a fee if you’re an account-holder. My bank (credit union, actually) prefers that we use the machine and won’t accept home-rolled coins.
We have a change jar in the kitchen cabinet. It’s about the size of a small peanut butter jar, and both my husband and I dump our change in there at the end of the day. We both also use our car ashtrays while out. When the jar gets full, I cash it in. If the jar is nearly full and my ashtray is about half-full, I can usually get about $50 or so. Depends on the penny-to-quarter ratio.
My husband also belongs to the Church of Never-Use-Change, but I will sometimes, if I know I have it.
Sometimes I hate you city people. Do you not realize that most of us don’t get to bank on a Sunday? If I could I’d be so up in that bank, I can’t even tell you.
At the grocery store where I worked, the coinstar machine would get use by students cashing in their change jars for beer money. One day, a stoner was in there with a bigass two or three gallon glass jar. I was bringing in a line of carts and hit the jar, shattering it. I helped the guy out with the rest of the coins and cleaned up the broken glass. He was OK with it, saying he didn’t need the jar anymore anyway. After he left, the boss came over and asked if the guy was pissed. I said no and the boss looked a bit too relieved. Then he showed me the spot on the jar where it said “1872.” Yeah, the stoner was keeping about $75 of change in a jar worth about $250.
I just have a little bowl on top of my bookshelf. Whenever I get too much change in my wallet, I toss it all in there and take out a buck now and again for tea. It works pretty well, I had about $40 in there when school ended. Now it’s down to pennies because I don’t have as much money coming in that I can just let milk money sit in a jar.
It is much easier if you don’t use your debit card much, I don’t because even though I have a good plan with the bank I easily go over my free uses of my card. It’s also a little easier to keep my spending down if I hide my card and just use cash for my weekly spending. This means I can often end up with 10-20 dollars in loonies and toonies hanging around in my wallet.
I was all stoked about this, but apparently they haven’t made it this far into Connecticut yet. This is a good article about Commerce Bank. All of their branches are open on Sunday, not just the big city ones.
Your bank charges you a fee if you use your debit card too much?? Wow. I never heard of such a thing. Around here it seems like we are really pushed to go cashless. Many employers (including mine) mandate that you are paid by direct deposit. Thats one reason I rarely have cash, and why I use my debit card so much.
And if my bank ever charged me to use my debit card, I’d be takin’ my business elsewhere.
Back to my OP…
I have saved $1.75 in change since that post. Yay me!!
First, I’m with a credit union and have been for the last 10 years. As a college student they let me stay on a youth fee plan, which is basically banking for free, despite being over the age of the limit. Bank statements, checks and debit card transactions are all free. The only thing I pay for is money orders and paying bills on a case by case basis, so I use my checkbook to get by this. But if I go over say 25 transactions in a month they charge me a small fee for each use unless I am at a Credit Union bank machine. Those are all free.
As you can imagine, stores go through the major banks for their debit machines. So using my debit card there, and at a machine elsewhere adds to my limit. Plus the bank machines I don’t bank with usually charge me a fee of 1.50 on top of my transaction (this is pretty much for every bank afaik).
So I usually stop in at the credit union atm and get any cash I need, or take it out in bigger batches at a different machine to save me lots of charges/adding to my limit. Thankfully we have a student credit union on campus, and a credit union on my way to/from school so this is easy to do.
As far as I know, the only bank that truly has a free checking account is CIBC, but I’m too lazy and content with my bank to go about switching it.
I forgot to add, if I was on a different plan it would be much the same. A monthly fee for a certain amount of transactions, anything over that you pay. Or you can go with no plan and just pay on a case by case basis.
I’m pretty happy with the plan I have now, and when I have to switch it’ll be maybe $5 a month for all I’m getting now.
My TD Canada Trust chequing account is totally free as long as I keep a minimum of $1000 in it. I’m pretty sure that’s not available to new customers any more, but you can certainly get free chequing accounts at various banks as long as you keep $x in your account (where $x varies with the bank). Since I hate service charges with a passion, I virtually never let my balance get below the magic number; that has the secondary advantage that if I ever do miscalculate I still never bounce cheques and I’ve never even considered getting a line of credit (I am absent minded at times, but I’m never absent minded enough to miscalculate by $1000!).
Except it’s very rare for me to have $1000 in the bank. I’m a poor student, that’s not going to happen unless I’ve just gotten my student loan in my account. And then I have to buy my books and pay my bills with that for the next few months.
Wow. I never heard of such a thing. Around here it seems like we are really pushed to go cashless. Many employers (including mine) mandate that you are paid by direct deposit. Thats one reason I rarely have cash, and why I use my debit card so much.