Found change challenge

"Find a penny, pick it up, the rest of the day you'll have good luck"

A silly saying but good words to live by in my opinion.  I was out in the field for work the other day which involved me walking up and down a busy street in my town, cataloging the condition of the public right-of-way.  Over the course of the day I found a dime and three pennies.  The next morning I found a dime left over in the checkout at the U-scan and a penny in the parking lot when I went grocery shopping.  Yet another dime appeared on my walk around the neighborhood later that day.  It occurred to me that I find a lot of spare change as I walk around.

I asked S how much change he finds throughout the year and he says he rarely finds any. I don't think it's because I am extra lucky that I stumble across free money more than other people.  I think the following things lead me to find free change:

1. I notice it when I see it.  My sister used to call me hawk-eye when we were little because I could always find dropped earring backs, needles, and other tiny objects that get lost when dropped onto a busy backdrop.  But I don't think I have keener eyes than others, I think I just recognize the value in loose change where others would blindly pass over a spare penny because it is worth so little.

2. I go out of my way to pick up spare change.  It's one thing to notice dropped change, it's another thing to walk over and pick it up if it's not in your direct path.  I always go out of my way to pick up spare change.

3. There's no shame in my game.  I'm not embarrassed to pick up a penny on the road just because I happen to be walking with a co-worker or because it's on the floor in a busy grocery store.  

Sunday evening I decided to do a little found change challenge.  For the next year I'm not only going to pick up any loose change I randomly come across, I'm actually going to start looking for it (I'll do some posts along the way on ways to find spare change).  I'm going to set aside all this found change in a jar.  Next July I'll count up the change and see how much free money I can find in a year.  I've even convinced S to participate so hopefully he'll start keeping his eyes open for loose change too.

Doing some late "spring" cleaning

Rounding up all our spare change last week put me in the purging mood and got me wondering how much money we have lying around in things we don't use/ need.  Over the next month I plan to go through the house with a fine tooth comb rooting out these unneeded objects and selling them via Ebay, Craigslist, and a large kids stuff consignment sale I will be participating in next month.  

I made an initial sweep this past weekend and currently have the following stuff listed on Craigslist and Ebay:

- Baby stuff including a large automatic swing, a floor mat entertainer, a carrier, and some maternity stuff: this is just the big ticket stuff, I have boxes and boxes of smaller value stuff that I will sell at the consignment sale a month from now.
- A futon frame: we're keeping the mattress but honestly it's so much more comfortable on the floor than on this metal futon frame... besides the mattress on the floor just adds to the Japanese motif the guest room seems to be taking on.
- Video games: yep, I like to play video games (which I buy used) but with two toddlers I almost never get to play and the likelyhood of me going back and replaying ones I've already beaten is pretty slim.
- Wedding dress: not going to use it again and I had two boys soooo... do I really need to hang onto it?

Obviously I don't know if all of the stuff listed will sell or how much it will sell for but if everything sold for a price around what I expect there is $450 in unneeded stuff lying around the house.  I'll be keeping track of everything I "find" over the next month to get rid of and how much it sold for.  Once the kids consignment sale is over I'll write a post on how much money we had lying around in unused stuff.

Counting the coin jar

Last week I was catching up on one of my favorite blogs, http://www.bloggingawaydebt.com/.  In one post the writer mentioned it was time to go around the house and collect all the spare money which he estimated would be between $60-90 bucks (accumulated over the past few months).  My initial reaction to reading this was “Yikes, how could someone have that much lying around and not know about it!” $90 (even $60) seems like a lot of money to me these days and I feel like over the past few years I have become so much more aware of where my money is, how much is being saved/ spent, and what every nickel is working towards.  But then I started wondering… how much money do we have just lying around in coin?  Is it possible we have that much in loose change?

This past weekend I went around the house collecting all our change.  There’s a bowl in the kitchen and on S’ dresser for collecting spare change.  We also have two little piggy banks in the boys room that we got as party favors at a baby shower that we sometimes put change into as a demonstration to our boys the importance of saving.  I dumped my coin purse and the little stash of quarters I keep in the cars for meters.  I also rooted through the cars, couch cushions, and picked up a few stray pennies randomly located throughout the house as I cleaned.  On a roll, I went through all our coat pockets and extra wallets/ purses.  

The final tally $33.08 plus a shiny golden 20 cent Euro.  I was honestly surprised that it came to that much.  I always try to use exact change and even empty my coin purse into the self scan checkout whenever there's not a line behind me.  S' dips into the coin jar for a gourmet coffee treat every once in a while and we always use quarters up at the meters downtown.  Also we only use cash for our discretionary spending, the small amount of pocket cash we get each week and for our monthly household random expenses.  Everything else is paid for either through online auto pays and bill pay or by debit card.  I can imagine if we were an all cash family that number would easily be double, possibly even triple.

It wasn't till I went to roll up the loot and couldn't find our coin sleeves that I realized that there's a gallon ziplock baggie still packed somewhere with all our pre-move coins (and the sleeves).  Eventually we'll get the rest of our stuff unpacked (why we even have so much stuff that we can have it sitting in boxes for three months and not need it is a whole other story) and we'll find the mystery money.  But for now, I just walked over to the bank on my lunch break to get some more sleeves... and found a dime on sidewalk, bringing our total to $33.18!  

Update: Found the missing bag o' change... add another $1.72 to the total loose money tally we had lying around our house.

2nd Quarter 2014

Starting point:

Student Loan 1 (My fed loan): $38,339
Student Loan 2 (S' state loan): $21,719
Student Loan 3 (S' fed loan): $5,454

Car Loan: $11,684

Credit Card 1: $10,577

Credit Card 2: $3,635

Credit Card 3: $0
Misc. small debts (S' small debts in collections): $5,443
Medical expenses: $3,672

Parents: $600

Total: $101,123

And here's were we are today:

Student Loan 1: $35,251
Student Loan 2: $19,511
Student Loan 3: $295

Car Loan: $0

Credit Card 1: $0

Credit Card 2: $122

Credit Card 3: $6,212
Misc. small debts: $4,284
Medical expenses: $300

Parents: $0
Consolidation Loan: $9,865

Total: $75,840

Paid off to date: $24,402 paid off + $5 in savings

This past quarter was by far the worst we've had since we started the debt reduction journey. Not only did we increase our debt by $1,695 over the last three months but we also drained what was left of our emergency fund.  As bad as it looks to see it all laid out like this there are some positives coming out of the past quarter.  First and biggest, is S' student loan (#2 in the list) has officially been rehabilitated and is no longer in default.  The number shown was from his last statement but we don't know for sure what the current balance is because we are waiting to hear from the lender that bought his loan from the collections company.

Secondly, we consolidated the credit card debt we accumulated during the move on the 15.99% card with S' student loan #3 with a private 8.39% loan from Lending Club.  With a $300 loan fee, it cost more up front (and contributed to the increase in debt) but it will cost us less in the long run by not paying 15.99% interest on that credit card debt.  Unfortunately, I forgot to factor in that fee when requesting the amount of the loan so we still have a couple more payments on the student loan and credit card before we will be done.

It was a rough 3 months financially but as I posted recently, we've finally gotten our act together and should be back on track to continue our debt reduction journey.  Our first step is to build our emergency fund back up, which is targeted to be back to $1000 by the end of the next quarter.