Coin Counting Day

Once, years and years ago, I read a story somewhere about a guy who obsessively collected coins. Just regular coins, not the kind that are worth anything more than face value. Any time he saw a penny, or nickel, or dime, or quarter lying on the street, he would pick it up. He got his wife in on the action, too. Eventually he cashed in all his coins and wound up with enough money to buy a new car.

At the time, I remember thinking there must have been more to the story. You don't just find a new car's worth of coins lying on the ground, even over the course of twenty years (or however long he'd been doing it). Was he fishing coins from fountains? But the story stuck in my mind, and I remembered it when I first moved to a place with an in-house washer and dryer. I had gotten into the habit of saving my quarters for laundry and suddenly I had all these quarters and no immediate use for them. So I began my own change jar, using a 2-quart plastic container with a screw-on lid that had once stored sugar (until the sugar started to smell funny).

I envisioned filling the jar all the way to the top with coins, and wondered how much "free" money that would earn me. But I wasn't patient enough. When the jar was about a quarter of the way full I could no longer stand the suspense and I carted it down to the grocery store. I emptied my jar into the Coin Star machine and self-consciously endured several minutes of clattering coins. I expected to get $20, or maybe $30, but the coins kept rattling around in the machine and the counter ticked it's way up to over $70. $70! That was a lot more than I had expected, and for a poor college student, it meant $70 that could be spent on "luxuries" like books, or clothes, or shoes. I think I bought shoes.

Since then, I've kept up my coin jar. I use cash a lot in my day-to-day purchases (that's just what works for me), so it's kind of like rounding up to the nearest dollar every time I pay for anything. I hardly notice those few extra cents on my purchases, but they add up over time. Several weeks ago I even managed to get a few dollars worth of pennies from John McE. who had just spent fifteen minutes trying to convince me both that pennies are essentially worthless and that, nevertheless, I should pay him for his pennies. I got them for free. They are worthless to him, but not to me.

Once or twice a year I eye my coin jar and decide it's about time. I take the jar down the street to my bank (where I can use the coin counting machine without a surcharge) and cash in my savings. To me, whatever I get, usually in the range of $50 to $80, is completely free money. I can spend it on whatever frivolity I want, guilt free, because this is money that in all my account reckoning has essentially popped up out of nowhere.

Sixty dollars or so is not enough to count as substantial savings, and someday when I actually have a real job it will count for even less. And honestly, I've come into a little extra cash before, by other means. So the acquisition of extra cash itself is not really that big a deal. But there's something about putting coins in a jar and wondering what they're worth and making myself be patient for just another month, or two, and the surprise and suspense of watching the numbers on the coin machine tick upwards feels new every time. As an adult, money is often a source of stress for one reason or another. But once or twice a year I am able to allow just a little bit of it to make me, for a moment, very childishly happy.

Today's earnings: $68.67