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.