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Raiding my coin jar

There is exactly $1.50 in my coin jar right now. One loonie and two quarters. It's not what you think, I haven't been looting it for coffee money. Well, not quite.

See, I despise pennies, and try to spend them right away, so they never make it into the coin jar. I have collected them in the past, but it takes so long to accumulate enough to put into a roll and then you have, what? Fifty cents. Wow. Not to mention that they are almost always grimy feeling and leave a bad smell on my fingers. Blech.

So I don't save pennies. Sometimes I save nickels and dimes but again it seems to take a long long time to accumulate enough to roll. The result is a little more satisfactory, $2 and $5, but it takes a while.


I do save quarters, loonies and toonies. These really add up, and I mentioned before how I managed to save up enough to buy a bass amp with just loonies (rolled up and cashed into bills, of course).

However just as I moved into the apartment I realized that I was going to have to have change for the laundry machines. I forgot to include this extra expense in my new spending plan, and decided I was going to try to take it out of the food/house allowance of $200 per month, if possible. In the house we had a washer and dryer in the basement and I paid for it through my hydro bill. Now I have to fork out a loonie and two quarters for each wash and the same for the dryer. I often skip the dryer and hang a load on my drying rack, but if the load is sheets and towels then I pay to put them in the dryer.

I rarely have cash on hand, since I decided to (carefully) keep using my debit card, but I manage to save a few dollars in loonies, toonies and quarters after a couple of weeks. I raid the jar for $4 almost every week to give to the church and my self-help group, and use about $6 each week for laundry.

So, no trips to Disneyland for us as a result of careful coin saving. Not yet, anyways. For now laundry is more important, and until I work that into the budget (more tweaking!) raiding the coin jar will have to do.


Seriously,
Karissa Dee


Comments

  1. We were going to use our coin money for Disney (I have been hoarding for YEARS) but in researching the parks we discovered that the kidlets are still too small for most of the rides! We have put it off for a couple of years. Instead we will be putting the snowflake money back into the local economy by taking three road trips within the province to visit family.

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