Yesterday, I watched a coworker count out twenty-two pennies while paying for a snack. Thankfully, there wasn’t a line of angry people behind her. I was impressed. I so rarely carry change. I usually have a few quarters in my wallet for emergency vending machine purposes, and there are always quarters in my car for tolls and parking meters, but beyond that, all my change ends up in a big jar on my dresser. Every so often, I take that jar to a CoinStar machine and exchange it for an Amazon.com gift code (no coin counting fee that way).
What do you do with your change? Do you spend it immediately? Throw it into fountains? Put it into socks and use as a weapon (I had a friend who kept a nickel filled sock by his bed to swing at any bad guys who might happen to break in)? Save it all for a rainy day? Or do you never ever use cash and thus never have any change to deal with?
Mostly I use my credit card so there are not so many coins…. But I do have a small jar of coins. It hasn’t gotten big enough to take somewhere to turn into cash yet!
It depends on how much I’m feeling the pinch! I usually try to use up whatever coins I have as I get them. But that’s partly because having spent many years working in a shop I know how annoying it is to be constantly having to open up new bags of change, hoping you have enough to last the day and wishing people would just pay the small change instead of always only having notes. The people in shops here (Germany) though are not at all backward about coming forward on this issue and most of the time, if you are paying cash, they will ask you for the small change.
So for the most part, I don’t ever have more than about two euro worth of change in my purse anyway. If I do end up with more for some reason, I go through phases of putting the coppers (5c, 2c and 1c pieces) into a piggy bank. I’m flat out broke this month so just raided my piggy bank to get my hands on the 13.45 that was in it. I planned to bring it to the bank and change it but it was Saturday and I wanted to buy a load of tomatoes. So I dumped a load of that change (mostly 5c pieces – didn’t want to be TOO cheeky) into my purse and off I went. I actually thought I had one more 2 euro coin in my purse than I did so ended up paying just over 4 euro in really small change. But it’s all money so why not! If anyone behind me had said anything I would have thanked them for having the patience to wait (if they were being nice about it) or (if they were being less than pleasant) started counting more slowly while regaling them with a story of exactly why I was using so much small change. I mostly like to pretend I’m a nice person but really, I’m not that nice a lot of the time
I don’t use cash that often, but when I have change it goes into a jar. Sometimes I use it to pay for parking when I go downtown, but it usually ends up going into my bank account and used to help fund a vacation or other large purchase.