Spare Change

I love change. Most people just toss their change in their car or on the counter. Not me. Every single penny that I get back I put in our coin jar. It started about 8 years ago and I just started throwing my change in this jar. We have it in our living room so that we always remember to throw our extra change in there. I am always amazed at how much money we collect just from our change. I think all of this obession started with my Dad. I remember being a teenager and he would clean out my car and take all the spare change that was on the floor of the car. He would always say, "look I just collected $1.18 off the floor of your car". I never thought that much about it. It was just a few pennies here and there.

I now know that all those coins add up. Monday I was bored and I decided to sit down and count all our change. (I told I was bored) I counted $86.00 worth of coins. And that's just two months of saving. Usually when it gets to a certain point we will cash it in and go out to dinner or something. This time I am determined to see how much we can save over 6 months or so. I remember one time when we were in the grocery store and there was ths guy with a HUGE coin jar. He was dumping all his coins in and it totaled something like $900. That's like getting an extra paycheck.

Now when I buy something I never give them the change to round it up. I don't care if it's $5.01. I want that 99 cents back to put in our coin jar.

With the way gas prices are going up we are going to need all this extra change we are saving for gas. Would you believe it cost us $90 to fill up both of our cars. And we won't have huge cars. It was $42 for mine and $45 for Laura's car. I wonder how high we are going to allow the gas prices to get before we start doing something about it.