It pays to save change

My mom is the queen of saving money for a special occasions.  Many times I can remember her tucking away money into an envelope for family trips, or for large items we wanted to get.  A few times she got me to set up Christmas club savings accounts.  In fact, it is thanks to my mom I ever got ANY kind of savings account.  For the most part, in my younger years, I lacked my mom's discipline to save money for special items or occasions (I have since gotten better), but the one thing that easily rubbed off on me was my mom's ability to and love of saving change.  I remember there was this huge glass bottle that sat next to my parents' bed, and it was where my mom saved pennies.  I LOVED that bottle, and I loved to dump out the pennies and count them.  I never even minded that my hands smelled all coppery afterwards.

When I moved out on my own, my opportunities to save change became fewer, as I needed it to pay to do my laundry at the laundromat.  But now that I have my own house, with a washer and drier, my change once again gets saved.  And lucky for me, Hubby loves to save change too.  We throw the change in a cup in our bedroom, which, when full, gets dumped into a bucket.  After the bucket has a good amount in it, we take it to a local Coin Star machine.  If you cash it in for cold hard cash, they of course take a cut, but if you get a gift card, you get the full amount, so, being the book nerds we both are, we usually take our reward in the form of an Amazon gift card.

Hubby recently did this, was was discouraged to find out the amount he got was less than he hoped for.  He was hoping for about $250, and got a little less than $200, which still made me happy.  He decided to order us some books, but we still had a large portion of the balance left.

Last night, we decided that I probably should replace my power cord to the laptop, since the electrical tape is not doing much to repair the damage Dexter inflicted upon it.  We log into Amazon, and see that the Kindle is on sale for $189.  Hubby immediately says, order it.  I was flabbergasted.  Are you SURE?  I asked.  His response was a resounding YES.  Turns out the reason he was so disappointed in the lower than expected amount of change cashed in was because he wanted to use it to buy me a Kindle, which at that time was over $200 dollars.  So, now, he was happy that the amount the Kindle cost was almost exactly what we had gotten in the first place.  And the books we already ordered, well, we still got good deals on them, and we would have gotten them eventually anyway.

So, the moral of the story is, save up your change, it really does pay off.  Thanks mom, for teaching me this lesson so many years ago!