Five years of change
I’ve been keeping coin change in a small plastic box underneath my bed. At some point during my first year in California, I realized the ridiculousness in the fact that I moved about 75 lbs of coin change from one side of the country to the other—Maine to California. I remember the shock of finding out that banks require you to wrap up your pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters into little paper rolls before depositing them. I have childhood memories of arge coin counting machines at banks, clink-clinking away in the background when my mom would take me to the bank before running errands. My god. Wrap coins up in paper rolls? Customer service is having your clients do manually what their business has machines to do?
Anyway, after realizing I’d have to spend a year of my life wrapping coins in paper tubes, I exhausted all of that change in my first few months as a graduate student, paying for everything in change. Eventually I whittled a veritable Fort Knox of coin change down to a collection of thousands of pennies. I ended up taking those on a roadtrip, and at some place in Wyoming or Nebraska, I paid something like $27 in pennies for gas.
A few weeks ago I signed up for a new account at a local credit union. I’ve never liked large banks, what with their fees and corporate interests and all. This credit union has been around for a long time and just about everyone I know who has been here for more than 10 years uses it.
One of the perks they offer is free use of their change counting machines for credit union members, so Saturday morning I brought the contents of the rubbermaid down and, only clogging the machine twice in 20 minutes, made a nice, fat deposit in my new account.
On a side note, whenever I get back from Canada and Europe, I have so much change it’s difficult to meet the return flight’s weight requirements. I like the idea of a dollar coin and all, but damn, it’s not too long before the sheer mass starts slowing you down. The loonie is all well and good until someone heading to the laundrymat breaks a femur.
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7 responses
Comment posted at 08:26 on Monday, June 27, 2005
Dude, that’s a lot of change!
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douglasq
Comment posted at 15:29 on Thursday, June 30, 2005
Uhh, heard of Coinstar?
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Comment posted at 08:34 on Friday, July 01, 2005
Uhhh, yes. Most machines take an unreasonable percentage, though. My credit union charged me nothing.
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Tom
Comment posted at 15:15 on Friday, July 01, 2005
Your blog prompted me to check out a can of pennies I’ve been saving for 26 years. At 10 pennies per oz. I estimate I have almost 5,000. I don’t know what to do with them, and the longer it goes the harder it is. Maybe I’ll use them to pay a particularly hateful bill, like a parking ticket or a library fine. I hate those foreign countries where you end up with a ton of metal in your pocket. I count up my non-copper coins every couple of years, usually $30-$50 worth, using a little plastic gizmo that sorts them into rolls.
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Jason Liske
Comment posted at 01:13 on Saturday, July 02, 2005
Was that really the receipt or was that a phony
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Comment posted at 08:06 on Saturday, July 02, 2005
Jason, that’s a magnification of the actual deposit receipt. You put all your coins into this machine and it gives you a receipt which you can then deposit at a teller or an ATM.
Tom, we now bank at the same institution; you should head down there with your change and lighten your estate.
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hotdamn
Comment posted at 17:42 on Wednesday, July 13, 2005
I like coins. I can’t help but look at the date on them. from time to time I separate them and put them in large plastic (empty) juice bottles.
so one day I’m flying to Reno, I decide to take my jug of quarters with me to cash them in (or out) and as I approach the security area of the air port I begin to see the error of my ways.
I hand the 20+ pounds of change to the guy standing by the X-ray machine. he paused for a moment and tells me “you’ve got to be kidding”.
I ask if he would like me to dump them out to show there’s nothing hidden inside and he hands me a tray. well the opening on the jug is just right to drop coins into, about an inch and a half wide… not so good for dumping them out again. after a few minutes of me shaking and shaking the coins out he grabs the bottle from me, hold it up to the light (!) and twists the bottle a few times. then hands it back to me. the look he gave me was “shut up and get the hell away from me”. I asked him if there was a smoking section in this area of the air port and he explains I’ll have to go out to the curb to light up.
“so I have to go back through security, don’t I”
“yep”
“OK, see ya in a few”.
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