I’ve seen an ad a few times about a machine where you can take your piggy bank, dump in the coins, and get bills for them. I don’t recall if you have to wrap them first, but in any case, I’d rather deal with a machine than my local bank. Where are these machines? (My piggy bank is bursting.)
Check your grocery stores. Here Food Lion has them. But be forewarned…they aren’t free. They charge you a percentage of how much you convert.
Oh phooey…never mind then. I’ll deal with the bank rather than pay. Thanks anyway.
The one at my local supermarket (Schnucks) charges 8% for the convenience of dumping your coins into a hopper.
The one at the Harris Teeter here charges…get this…eleven percent. No deal on that…
Some banks won’t do it period. Some banks charge too. Pays to check it out. I work in a hotel and fortunately our cashier will take my pennies.
If you have a great many coins, it might be worthwhile to get something like this.
Kroger (A grocery store)
Any bank will galdly hand you free coin rolls so that you can do the counting yourself.
If you don’t enjoy copying your account number a dozen times then do what I do: carry your coin to a local mom and pop merchant. These folks pay a fee of around three percent to the banks to get coin rolls. They’re glad to get rolled coin at cost from a trusted customer. And one way or another they’ll often return the favor.
This is gonna be more of an IMHO post…but I advise just rolling coins while watching TV. If you have the flat tubes, mark them with your name and phone/acct number* first, then open them, fold them at 90 degrees to the first folds, then do that twice more, so that the wrappers form an octagon. Open the wrappers so that they’re more or less tubelike. Make stacks of five coins, then slip them into tubes, poking one finger into the bottom of the tube. For pennies, you need 50 coins (50 cents), nickels take 40 coins ($2), dimes take 50 coins again ($5), and quarters…hmmmmm, can’t remember quarters. I usually don’t roll my quarters, as I generally buy things out of vending machines with them. Anyway, fold the ends of the tube down. Tape or not, as you are inclined. Take to the bank and deposit into your SAVINGS account. It will add up. For extra points, toss in your grocery coupon savings each time you get back from the grocery store.
My grandfather had a rubber stamp made up, saying “For deposit only (his name and account number)” and he used to stamp his incoming checks and the coin wrappers with them. However, these things cost at least six bucks, so it’s up to you as to whether you’d get enough use from them.
*Those freebie mailing address labels you get in the mail from various charities are good for this, though I wouldn’t use them for this if I had to actually pay for them, or if I would use them otherwise. Generally, I don’t like the design of them.
Of course, if you pay exact change when you can, you won’t accumulate the stuff. I always carry all the change I accumulate, and start paying exact amounts when I realize I’ve got a large pocketful. You could just start carrying some of it, and pay for things with it, until you use it up.
(Yes, I’m that bastard you want to strangle who’s holding up the line by counting out the exact $11.87 if he has it, or making the cashier’s life difficult by paying $12.12, so that he gets rid of a couple of pennies and gets a quarter back)
Find one at http://www.coinstar.com - they have a search thing to find where they live.
I find the large commission distasteful, and yet, it’s still better than having either a pocket full of metal or a box of change accumulating. For me, anyway.
around here they have those coin star machienes but some of them are operated by chairities
So you dont feel bad for paying for it besides 8.1 percent wouldnt add up to much unless it was over 10 bucks
Could you count the 8 percent as a tax write off ?
I usually wait until I have a few hundred dollars’ worth of change before I go to the Coinstar machine. Am I the only one who gladly accepts the 8% commission? Personally, I think rolling change and taking it to the bank is time-consuming enough to justify it.
The last time I rolled change and took it to the bank, the teller made me write my name, address, telephone number and social security number on each and every roll, in case a roll came up short. I’m never doing THAT again.
those coinstars are a bit too much at 8% i was going to chang about £50 into one and saw the commission charge and went accross the road to the bank , the nice lady behind the counter put them all in a scale and weighed how much there was and put the amount into my account , and i could take it out as notes
As a former bank teller, I can say that rolling coins is a waste of time. If anyone brought us rolled coin, (any coin, for that matter) we would break open the rolls and run it through the coin counter. This also separated out the canadian coins, and any other chaff. Two examples of why we did this, one: guy comes in with $100 worth of rolled quarters, we bust them open, and between every real quarter were plastic slugs. two: kid comes to my teller lane with two rolls of quarters. I go bust them up, every one of them is silver. Point out to kid that if he went to a coin shop he could get 2-3 times the $20 value. Kid just wants his $20. I oblige and purchase the coins myself…
Don’t you get the deer-in-the-headlights look from the cashiers when you try that? I’ve been behind people who do that, and the cashiers never get it on the first take.
It’s been known to happen, yes. These days, most places seem to have electronic cash registers that allow the cashier to simply key in what you handed them, and tell them what to give back. They don’t have to think about it.
And I just noticed those change collecting machines in the Albertson’s around here. I wasn’t curious enough to examine them closely, particularly since they always seem to be in use. I probably wouldn’t have noticed them except for the noise. 8% seems REALLY steep, but it doesn’t surprise me that people would be lazy enough to accept that to avoid counting up their change.
Funny supermarket machines that gave money - anybody else remember Safeway’s “Golden Goats”? These were automated machines that gave you money for your aluminum cans.
My local University Library has a change machine that gives quarters, no matter what you put in (save cent pieces). So I’d trot down to the library with my big jar of nickels and dimes. After much racket, I wind up with a nice load of quarters. Quarters are big enough for me that I don’t need to worry about spending them.
Just take your stash to a casino.
When I was 15 and living in Reno I tried cashing in my liftime earnings (about four mason jars stuffed with loose change) at the bank, but they didn’t have a coin sorter. So instead we drove to the nearest casino, dumped it all out into various plastic buckets, and took it to the cashier. Got it all sorted and converted into green in no time. No hassle, no waiting, and best of all, no commission.