Coffee Can Savings Challenge
October 20, 2008 by Karen Weideman
Filed under financial matters, saving money
The following is a guest post.
I read a story once on how this man saved money by placing an empty water bottle (the type from Sparklettes) by his dresser. Every night before going to bed he’d empty out his pockets. Any change leftover from that day he would dump into the bottle. This added up as you can imagine and by the time he took it to the bank he had well over hundreds of dollars in there.
Here’s my challenge to you:
Get yourself an empty container of some sort. I don’t care if it is a coffee can, 2 liter bottle of soda pop or even an empty wipes box. Clean it out and prepare it. Tape it completely on the sides (wipes) so you won’t open it. Every night you empty your change and on Friday come back here and tell me how well you did.
I will do the same, lets see who ends up with the most. This is very hard for me as we are always scraping the last bit of change around here for small stuff. Maybe this will wake us up.
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Eliza is a wife and stay-at-home mother to four children that range from 11 years to 1. When she isn’t busy playing video games with them or changing diapers, she enjoys blogging and reading books. For a more personal view of her life, you can find her blogging about motherhood at Babylune or The Life of a Home Mom.
My boyfriend does that – he got around EUR 360,- within a year. I however prefer withdrawing a certain amount from my account at the beginning of a month and sticking to it – I MUST NOT SPEND MORE than that.
Hrm… I almost never have any cash on hand, so I will lose, hands-down.
I rarely use cash, and when I do have change I use it at CVS so I’m not putting 10-75 cents on my debit card each trip lol.
My husband and I put our spare change into our son’s piggy bank. It was full a few weeks ago so we went down to the bank to open a new savings account. I was completely stunned when the change added up to almost $200!
A great way to do this so you don’t have to pay someone or spend hours counting coins – use one of those coin sorters. We have a small one on our dresser. I think it cost me $2. We use it and then when the coin slots are full, I wrap them up and take them to the bank. (Okay, sometimes we do spend them.)
We started this a coupe of years ago when we were saving for our first trip down to Disney, and have continued to do so ever since (because now we are planning another trip there).
Every other month we take what is in there to the bank, and throw it into the Money Market fund so it will earn interest the remainder of the time.
We have sacked away better than $300 dollars this year doing it this way. (I never spend any change. I always use paper money and keep all change every day to be added to the coffee can).
Lorraine: I don’t have to roll coins anymore! Hooray! I take my jar to the credit union and they have a machine that you dump them in. It counts the coins and prints out a ticket with the amount you had. You use the ticket to get the money or you can deposit it into your account. I always deposit ours into my money market.
Jay: All of our lose change and all of my blogging money goes into our money market. So far, so good. I’m pretending that money isn’t even there. I’m not sure what we’ll use it for. Maybe a down payment on a house. We’ll see.
Karen, that’s a lot of spare change
Hey, I wanna be a part of this… can I dump my current collection of coins, or do I have to start new?
I prolly have 30 bucks, so I’ll start new. I think I’m gonna change it up a little and every month count it out, and match it with cash and contribute to my kid’s savings account.