Quick tip: bank your change for great savings
November 19, 2008 by Jennifer Chait
Filed under save-money
I read once that on average, the typical person gathers about $400 in change each year. That’s if the person spends only cash and then puts all their coins into a jar. With the prevalent use of debt and check cards, cash seems to be out of style. However, what you can do with this information is use it to your advantage.
IF the average person can save up $400 in change, and you consider yourself an average indiviual, than you can afford to put $400 away each year into something.
Each year use $400 to….
- Pay off some credit.
- Add to a college fund.
- Add to your retirement.
- Fix up your house a little and improve it’s value.
- And more.
Sometimes it’s hard to put cash away, especially when we don’t see actual cash as often. If you think about this average change savings per year, maybe it’ll make more sense to you, to save this amount and put it to good use.
[image via stock.xchng]
I’ve been doing this for several years. I also skim off $1.00 a day out of my husband’s wallet when I collect the change. All of that goes into an ing account. It really adds up fast!
We’ve been doing this for our kids since Day 1. I even go so far as to give a clerk a whole dollar if only 3 cents of it is required, just so I can get that remaining 97 cents to put in my kids’ banks.
What a huge feeling of satisfaction when we were able to convert my 7-year-old’s savings account into a higher-yielding money manager account just last month because of his substantial balance.
It’s true…every little bit helps!
I use change all the time! One thing to remember – avoid those CoinStar machines. They charge 9%! You can sit down with your kids and roll coins and save that fee.
Good advice. I always round expenditures up to the next dollar and deposits down to the next dollar (or sometimes $5) to build a little savings “cushion” in my checking account. Since we use our debit cards and/or checks for virtually everything, it really adds up. I move the money to savings every year or two and it’s usually around $500/year. We actually used money I had saved this way as part of our down payment on our house! It just started as a way for me to not go crazy trying to balance the checkbook to the penny, but has grown momentum as a real savings plan that works for us (we have a family of four now). And since it’s money that we never “see”, it’s a lot easier to fight temptation to spend it and we don’t even have to count/roll anything either!