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Making a Change in Your Savings Habits

Blog | April 9th, 2012

Walking down the street, you notice a little jingle-jangle in your pocket. Almost like a tambourine, it keeps time with your every step and gives you a soundtrack to march to as you travel down the street. What is it that’s making your walk so noisy? Well basically, it’s a pocket full of gold!

            The change in your pocket is like your own private goldmine. Don’t think of it as a couple of cents here and there. This could be your children’s college fund, or it could be a vacation waiting to happen. By simply keeping your extra change you can make saving a lot easier in a whole new way. How can you go about saving big with just a little bit of change? By taking just a few simple measures with the coins in your pocket.

            The first thing that you need for your coin-saving mission is something to put all of your change in. What you choose for this purpose will depend on how much you want to be saving. You can use anything from a plastic bowl to a giant plastic water bottle. The more it can hold, the more you can save!

            Now that you have something to put your coins in, you need to decide where you are going to put it. If you are going to try and save your change every single day then you need to put the vessel in a place where you will remember it. Try keeping it on a table next to the front door or, if it’s big enough, put it next to the couch or your bed. Now you will remember to always save your change!

            Now that you have your routine figured out, it is time to start saving that change! If you are going to succeed then you need to make it a part of your daily habit. Whenever you come across change or find that you have that jingling in your pocket, keep it and put it into whatever container you decided on. If you need quarters for laundry, you can separate those out into a separate pile and just save your nickels, dimes and pennies.  

            Once you have started to keep all of your change and you have a big pile of it, you are going to put it somewhere. You can’t exactly take a big bundle of nickels and dimes down to the travel agency can you?  One solution to this problem is to go down to the bank and get a bunch of coin wraps. You will probably have to spend a good chunk of time rolling and wrapping your change but it will be much easier to deposit when you do!
            While it may seem tempting to just take that chunk of change and dump it into the nearest CoinStar, don’t do it! While convenient, these machines will take upwards of nine cents per dollar you deposit. If you are depositing a bunch of money, that could be a huge portion of your savings before you even get to spend it!

            Keep your change in your pocket and save it using one of these methods. It will almost be like opening your own personal savings account and you won’t even realize you are doing it. What money saving methods have you used in the past? Tell us about them!