What coins, bills, do you want to use?

In My Humble Opinion
21

I love money. All money. I pick up change, yes, even pennies, off the street. Money is money, and it all spends the same.

However, I don’t spend change, with the exception of 50 cents a day for a newspaper. (I also put quarters in foos tables, but generally I break bills for those quarters, same for my monthly poker game). All my change goes in a jar or can or somewhere. It adds up incredibly fast. I’m addicted to saving change, to the point where if my total at the grocery store is $50.02 it makes me happy because I’m “saving” 98 cents.

For that matter, I rarely spend ones, except for tipping. I’ll break a five or a ten every round at the bar, tip, and then stash the rest of the ones. For the next beer, I’ll break another five. At the end of the night I have pockets full of ones which go in the sock drawer for the inevitable rainy day. Even in the desert, it rains.

Those of you who don’t want your change, or ones, LMK, I’ll take it all off your hands. :slight_smile:

22

Me, I’d drop the penny and nickel, keep the dime, unfortunately, I’d have to ditch the quarter as well :frowning: I like the quarter too… but it won’t work if you round everything to the nearest 0.10. I'd create a new, more convenient .50 piece that we can all use in vending machines and video games. All transactions will be rounded to the nearest ten cents, just like today they are rounded to the nearest one cent.

Or… ditch the penny nickel and dime, keep the quarter and fifty cent. Round all transactions to the nearest quarter dollar, I could live with that, then we’d get to keep the quarter, woo hoo!

Don’t need bills bigger than $100, who carries that much cash around anyway?

Coins:
Dime (or Quarter)
Fifty cent
Dollar

Bills:
(Two?)
Five
Ten
Twenty
Fitty
Hunned

23

My daughter loves pennies. She picks them up whenever she sees them. Her friends always give her pennies. She takes mine on the rare occasions when I use cash. (She’s 18, so we’re not talking toddler here.)

Not to hijack, but I wonder if there will come a time that using currency will be the exception. My debit card is my usual method of spending. It’s rare for me to have even $5 in assorted change in my wallet.

Personally, I wouldn’t much miss pennies and nickels. I understand the reasoning for dollar coins instead of dillar bills, but the coins are so doggone heavy ane bulky, five singles in the wallet are hardly noticed. Five Sackies in the coin purse are lumpy or in the pocket, they’re noisy.

Hence my preference for the debit card.

24

I detest the Sackies. The size is all wrong… too much like a quarter.

Here in Vermont we get Canadian money all the time, and I like the size and feel of the loonie. We should emulate Canada on this one (which would make the Canadiians feel good), issue the coin, withdraw the bill, and call it a day.

I like Marge Simpson’s statement on the Sacky: “If you take it down to the bank, you can exchange it for a REAL dollar!”

25

I thought I was the only one who likes to save up all his change. I have a big plastic Coca-Cola bottle bank and I have filled and emptied it several times since I got it back in 1992. A few months ago I filled it to the top again and emptied it out, sorted, counted and rolled it all. I had about $1300 in quarters alone, about $300 in dimes and about $50 in nickels. It takes about three years to fill it each time. I stopped putting pennies in there and I keep them separated in a separate jar.

To answer the OP, here are my opinions:

Pennies- I think the time has come for us to ditch them. Nobody wants them and I try to get rid of them myself by using them with purchases that don’t end in a 0 or 5 in the cents column. They lose their luster too quickly and after a few years they’re just a bunch of brown, tarnished coins. I’d rather use my own supply than take pennies from the penny cups that many businesses use. Still, if I see pennies on the ground or otherwise abandoned I’ll pick them up and pocket them. Money is money, anything that adds to my wealth, however little, is worth the small effort of bending over.

Nickels- Keep this one. There usually aren’t too many of them in one’s change as, unlike pennies where you could get back as many as four, only one is the most that is ever needed in a change transaction (unless two are used in place of a dime). I also like the nickel since it makes for more affordable slot machine and video poker play when I go to Nevada.

Dimes- Nothing wrong with them monetarily, though they are a little small for rolling as my big fingers have a hard time with them.

Quarters- Definitely a keeper. I just love having a whole huge pile of them to count and roll when my change bank gets full. I also like collecting all the state quarters (Idaho’s won’t come out until 2007 since it ranks 43rd in statehood.)

Half dollars and silver dollars- I wish there were more of these in circulation. I like nice, big and heavy coins. They have a “rich” sound to them as they jingle and jangle in one’s pocket or when being set on a counter. They feel nice in the hand, too.

Sackajawea dollar- (sp?) I was hoping this one would take off since having a dollar coin would be very convenient for vending machines (I hate stubborn vending machines that have trouble accepting a dollar bill, even if it’s crisp and fresh off the press.) If Canada can do it, why can’t we? (maybe we could introduce our version of the Twonie, a Pocahantas dollar, perhaps) I had a feeling it would flop because of the continued existence of one dollar bills. Also, since they aren’t in widespread circulation they’re hoarded by amateur numismatists (sp?) and this presents a catch-22 situation; they won’t get into circulation because people aren’t spending them and people don’t spend them because they’re not widely circulated. I wish they didn’t tarnish so quickly, either. This was the biggest disappointment to me when they came out.

Paper money- I’d keep all the fives and higher and do away with the one dollar bill. The one dollar bill wears out too quickly and too often I get old, tattered ones in my money. A dollar coin would do just fine in its place. I wouldn’t have a problem with the weight issues (the added weight would give me that “I’m rich” feeling). I don’t go to strip bars, so that’s not of any concern to me. As for the color, green is just fine. It’s the color we Americans have come to associate with money and any other color would seem out of place. I don’t think there’s anything ugly about our current bill designs at all. I’d like to see $500 and $1000 come back into circulation (granted, I’ll probably never be rich enough to have them, and I seldom have $100s in my possession). In this day and age of electronic cash transfers and security issues with large bills we’ll probably never see these bills again.

26

A slight hijack here, but I want to be able to use Mr. Burns’ $1 trillion bill…If I can get it back from El Presidente.

I’m not above picking up pennies on the ground, as it all spends the same in the end.

27

I suppose most folks don’t, and I guess the only reason these days for a $500 would be POS drug smugglers or people who buy big-ticket items for resale.

In my example, I deal in antique edged weapons. I need to carry a *minimum * of $300 with me at any given time in case I run into a buying opportunity. It’s helpful for me to carry at least $1000, in case of really good or multiple items, but it’s an annoyance to carry more than $500 plus daily working money (but then who is going to have change if I carry 2 $500s?) Strangers won’t take my checks, debit cards or credit cards; I need cash. I can’t think of an intermediate denomination that would work, either… $200 bills? $250s?

Maybe it’s just the perils of the trade. Let’s imagine someone who deals in, say, used Porsches. Sometimes it’s helpful to have cash on the spot if you run into someone who needs to liquidate a car to pay alimony or something.

28

Isn’t there a 200 Euro note?

Also, taking another cue from europe, I’d ditch the $1 bill, but add a $2 coin. I think that having $5 as the smallest bill would be easier with a $2 coin.

29

No coins over fifty cents, no! Change in one’s pocket should be negligible, I hate walking away from a street musician while traveling and belatedly realizing I just charitably donated about five times the amount I’d intended to. :smack:

Change is supposed to be small, that’s the entire point! I’d be fine with a revival of the two dollar bill, and the penny is long overdue for retirement, but I hate hate hate the idea of getting rid of paper singles.

Collecting change, for whatever reason, would get all jacked up with one and two dollar coins, either you’d have to constantly monitor what you’re throwing into the jar or you wind up embarking on a very poorly planned investment strategy.

The thought of not having dollar bills anymore is just weird.

30

I’m tired of rolling all these big stone coins around.

31

HUH? The Sackie is so close to the Canadian dollar in size and weight that at my job I get Loonies in the rolled dollar coin the bank sends us! I have to fish for them with a magnet because our customers bitched about getting Loonies from our change machines that the vending machines wouldn’t take.

Explain yerself, mister.

32

Remember when some feminists said (I don’t know how serious they were) the Susan B. Anthony was designed to fail, because it featured a woman? I feel the same about the Sacky. Obviously, it’s way too similar to a quarter.

When I was in England several years ago, I fell in love with the one-pound coin. Smaller than a quarter in diameter, but very thick and heavy. Identifiable in the pocket by feel alone. Perfect for tipping and many incidental purchases. We need something like that.

33

You forgot to list “Yap” in the location slot…

For the uneducated…
That’s ‘Yap, Federated States of Micronesia,’ not the euphemism for ‘mouth.’

34

The reason that $1 coins and $2 bills and any new denomination won’t catch on is simple: There’s no slot for them in the standard cash-register drawer.

You spend a $2 bill, they say, “Oh don’t see those too often,” and slip it underneath the drawer. It doesn’t get given out in change; it stays there until they clear out the drawer and it gets taken back to the bank the next day, to remain there until some nut-job like me comes along and asks if the teller has any $2 bills.

Sure, the standard drawer has an extra slot or two, but in my retail experience those were never used for $2 bills or Susan Bs; it’s used for the keys to the back door, or it’s full of rubber bands and paper clips, or something like that.

That’s my take on it, anyway.

35

If the govt gets rid of $1 and $2 notes and replaces them with coins then the coins catch on. Sure you wander round for a few months thinking they are weird but they catch on anyway.

Shopkeepers seem to find somewhere to put them too. :wink:

36

Yeah, but the “getting rid of them” part is the killer; they can’t just one day take all the bills out of circulation, and they can’t just make all shopkeepers switch over to new tills. It’s kind of the same reason we’re still using the “QWERTY” keyboard.

37

They can’t take the bills out of circulation but they can stop printing new ones. The bills already in circulation will wear out within a year or so and the coins will begin to circulate, which will rather force the issue on redesigning or adapting tills.

38

Dump the penny, you free up a coin slot for $1 coins, dump the paper dollar, you have a bill slot for $2 bills. Adding new currency without taking anything away is a bad idea, inertia keeps the old stuff flowing, making it hard for the new stuff to catch hold.

The key for any change in US currency is to do away with the penny and paper dollar, they are both far too low in value to keep in their current form.

39

Personally I’d like high value coins. When I was in Germany I loved being able to pay for beers–or even an inexpensive restaurant tab–entirely with coins. They were retiring the 5DM note when I was there, and that was in 1977!

Seventy-five years ago a dollar was worth anywhere from 20 to 50 or more times what it is today, depending on what you were buying. To be fair, a few things, like the telephone, were vastly more expensive in real terms. But for day-to-day stuff you could rely almost entirely on coins. For each denomination of coin there was a variety of things you could buy, just with that one coin. A penny was enough for candy. A nickel was good for a cup of coffee, pack of cigarettes, or a ride on the bus or subway. A dime bought enough to have an entire class of stores named after it. A quarter was enough to buy lunch, and so on. You get the idea.

What’s astonishing about these facts is that it shows how our views of what money should be have changed in the time since then. We now seem to believe that it’s essential to have what are really infinitesimally small pieces of money, way too small to purchase anything. But before the age of inflation, I think people believed that no piece of money should be produced that was worth too little to be enough for at least some purchase. Even a penny, in their view, should be a big enough chunk of wealth to enable you to buy at least a few things.

The truth is, I would love to have all prices and salaries repegged downward by 95%, and start using coins!

40

What kind of cash drawers do they use in other countries, where they have more kinds of coins in circulation? When I was in Germany they had seven or eight commonly circulating coins, but the cashiers there somehow managed. Nowadays with the Euro I imagine they have fewer coins, but it’s still got to be a lot more than we have here.