Today I saw a person rummaging through his wallet as he was trying to find some money. Interestingly enough, there were some pennies in his wallet and so he decided to literally throw them in the garbage. I was trying to fathom the logic in that.

This is actually not the first time that I have seen someone throw away their small loose change too. If you really don’t want it just donate it I’d say. But throwing it in the garbage? So very strange.

Finally got around to counting all of the loose change. Again, here is the picture for reference:

The breakdown came out to something like this:

Pennies: 408 = $4.08
Nickels: 134 = $6.70
Dimes: 207 = $20.70
Quarters: 355 = $88.75
Loonies: 39 = $39
Toonies: 25 = $50

Total = $209.23

Not the highest I have accumulated, but decent I’d say. I know what surprises most people usually is how many quarters there are as normally one would expect to only have a lot of pennies. Most of my loose change comes from buying items from stores that don’t accept a credit card. Example, if an item was $1.50 most likely I would only have a five dollar bill and so at the end of the day that coin change gets stored.

Almost like a self disciplined savings contribution. I can easily imagine spending it too if I didn’t store it away at the end of the day. Now the trickier part is usually afterwards on what to use the money on as I don’t just want to spend it on say dinner but rather find a way to invest it to hopefully accumulate more funds.

So with all this talk about the economy crisis and people trying to save money, one comment I read was how people have to scramble for loose change in their homes just to pay the bills. This made me curious on how much loose change I have saved thus far. As you all may know, my loose change habit is to simply dump it into like a piggy bank as a way to prevent me from spending it on say some kind of vending machine on a different date.

So first of all, here are the “piggy banks” that I use:

Hey, sometimes your old savings habit as a kid can still help you out in your adult life as well. Of course, you all want to see how many coins correct? Well, here it is:

From left to right, these are the coins and the individual value for each:

1) Quarters = 25 cents
2) Nickels = 5 cents, Dimes = 10 cents
3) Pennies = 1 cents
4) Loonies = 1 Dollar, Toonies = 2 Dollars

I know most people wonder how much you can save with a simple habit like this. I’m not sure about this bunch yet as I haven’t fully counted it. But if you want, take a guess how much this all equals too. I’ll post the total amount of each coins and value at a later date.

I heard a conversation today where people were paying for a bill at a restaurant and they decided to pay in cash. Like most restaurants, the workers would give you back your change in a coin tray and many times people would leave an X amount of money from that as the tip.

There happened to be some pennies in the tray and so they decided to leave the ideal amount as the tip as well as the pennies. However, a person then brought up the point on how she heard on a radio show that it is rude to leave pennies as waiters/waitresses hate that while considering it an insult and so they should take the pennies.

I was just thinking to myself there on how one can consider that as rude as the customer is essentially giving more free money to the worker. I personally would view it as the same as when someone buys something at a store and doesn’t want the change and so the store gets to keep it for extra profit.

I guess I can understand the cumbersome of counting pennies at the end of the day, but to classify that as rude is beyond me personally. Every penny counts in my opinion and money is money in this situation.