Pound Foolish No More

I have this huge piggy bank of my own which stands about three feet high. It's amazing how quickly it fills up. Every four months or so, I start to empty it out and spend hours separating change and rolling it. I generally concentrate on the loonies, twoonies and quarters since the pay-off is larger for the amount of backbreaking gross work it takes (one year, we paid our mortgage for several months with the change that had accumulated).

Sometimes I enlist my kids to help out, but since the task often takes hours to fully complete, they start losing interest within the first hour. What usually happens is that I dump out the contents of the piggy bank onto a newspaper, separate out the bigger change and roll that, and then deposit all the smaller change back into the piggy bank. This means that I've accumulated a ton of pennies. I know it's Hallowe'en today, but we never have that much of a demand for Unicef that I can rid myself of the thousands of pennies in my possession.

There are those Cashstop machines at the grocery stores that I've kept passing but have never used. Recently, I stopped and checked it out. The surcharge is almost ten cents per dollar counted (nine and eight-tenths to be exact). I was pretty astounded when I first saw that and thought "Forget it. I'll just do it myself. That's way too much money to lose".

But then I thought about it. I have A LOT of pennies and the bank will only accept them for deposit if they are rolled into those plastic sleeves. I usually only buy the sleeves for everything but pennies, because they cost a dollar (at the dollar store of course) for a package of ten. It's fine to pay that if you're going to roll loonies and twoonies because you spend a minimal amount to net out a fairly large chunk of cash, but in the case of pennies, I realised that one package of sleeves would only roll five dollars worth of change. I would therefore be losing one-fifth of my money, not to mention the amount of time it would take to carry out the gross and grimy task (I hate how mucky my hands get within minutes of touching all that change). How many hours would it take to roll the number of pennies that I had and couldn't I use that time in a way that might make me more money than I was trying to save?

Once I realised that it was more cost-effective to use the machine for the pennies, I shovelled all the pennies into a large strong canvas bag and humped it down to the store. It was a pretty staggering weight. I thought I was going to get a hernia trying to lift it into my car.

As it turned out after only ten minutes of depositing all my change into the machine, I ended up with a little over $440.00 worth of pennies. The surcharge was $40.00 (as compared to the $88.00 it would have cost me in plastic rolling sleeves) and it was worth every penny in my opinion. That and the experience of getting out to the grocery store where everyone gawked at me and my big bag of change made it all worth it.

P.S. I had some sexagenarian attempting to flirt with me while his elderly wife looked on ... I'm not sure if he was turned on by the fact that I was a babe who saved or if he wanted to hit me up for some cash. He stood there watching me and chatting me up for a good five minutes. It was really quite funny.