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Scott and I were looking all over the house for a misplaced video camera today when I ran into a tiny pile of change in an odd out of the way place. He stopped me from taking it to the change bowl because "You don't see quarters like that!" Whee, big deal, Neal. Here's your stupid quarters, may they sit and rot. They were minted in the last 12 years.
I'm a coin roller. My dad was an avid coin hoarder and had me sorting, value assessing, and rolling coins by the time I was ten. Two decades later, several quart jars of nearly mint silver dollars made a huge farm payment because silver had inflated while the cattle market dropped. All that is changing. Now people laughingly collect state quarters that have less value than 'real' quarters used to before they changed the metal recipe in them.
Click to go to the site.
I pick up every nasty penny I see, roll it up, change it out. I've gotten several hundred dollars out of icky beaten up and green pennies over the last 30 years. Recently, my bank told me they were going to debit my account a penny after they unrolled them and found a green one, because it had to be pulled out of circulation. I said well then, I want that penny back. They were stunned. It had been mine until I handed it to them, it was legal tender while I held it, and them not honoring an exchange after taking it was stealing, wasn't it? They reversed the debit and credited a penny back to my account. What they do with it is their business. If it wasn't legal tender, they should have refused it in the first place, because I could have used it somewhere else and it would have still been worth something.
Ok, let's find out why I'm crazy. Even if you don't like math, you will find this astonishing.
According to worldometers, there are currently 325,312,554 (and growing) people living in the United States. Let's round that down to 325 million for easy math.
If one penny per year for every single person in the U.S. was dropped on the ground, never picked back up again to be used as legal tender, $3,250,000 would be lost. That is over 3 million dollars.
If we bumped that up to a penny for every person per month, that would be $39,000,000 lost in a year's time. That is nearly 40 million dollars.
But let's be conservative and assume all we lose a year is 3 million dollars. Now multiply that by ten years, that is 30 million dollars.
Let's play around with the per month thing times ten years. If every person in the U.S. dropped one penny per month for ten years, never to be picked up again, that comes up to $390,000,000, or nearly 4 *hundred* million dollars. That's nearly half a billion, guys.
When I see the same people. who fuss about taxes and government spending, leave coins on the floor or sweep coins into a dust bin or walk past coins in parking lots, I think about millions of dollars just sinking back into the earth. I once saw a coworker in a break room sweep a bunch of change out from behind vending machines into a dustpan and stopped him just before he tipped it into the trash. I bought an Egg McMuffin with that change. I got a free Egg McMuffin. I asked him why in the world would he throw money away like that, and, besides acting like it was too dirty to be touched, he sniffed down his nose on what a small amount it was anyway. And in my head I'm thinking You're sweeping a floor for minimum wage, and you think that money is too dirty and insufficient to care about.
This. Country. Is. Messed. Up.
Stop blaming governments and minimum wage and taxes and all that money y'all blow on salons and magazines and beer and cigarettes on why you're broke and can't make your bills. The attitude that money isn't worth picking up is what blows my mind.
I have filled up gas tanks on spare change, bought sheets of stamps with spare change, mailed Christmas boxes with spare change. I pick up spare change everywhere I see it, I roll it up, and I turn it in for usable cash. My generation is probably the last generation that will see 'free money' like this. Once it all goes digital, your chance to get free Egg McMuffins out of other people's lazy pockets is gone.
I sound like a bum, but I live in a decently nice house, and I drive a decently nice car. I just paid cash for $750 glasses, not because I'm rich, but because I don't waste that money on other stuff. I had my last pair of glasses for 8 years, the pair before that also lasted 8 years. If this pair also lasts 8 years, that's only $93.75 per year to wear really nice glasses. (I don't have vision coverage.) This year I got the full monty- anti-glare, no-line digital lenses, tiny little decorative jewels, and the cool Vogue swish. And yeah, I'll still stop and pick a nasty penny up in a parking lot.
I roll up about $40 a month in change. That is $480 a year. I've been doing that since we moved into this house, so round down to 20 years, that is $9,600 of free stuff I've gotten out of rolling other people's coins. I bet you guys buy lottery tickets thinking you'd be happy getting $20 out of them because so many are wastes of paper.
This could be the first country to go cashless "The Danish government has proposed that most stores could dump their cash registers from January 2016."
Like I said, once we go digital, no more free money.
I'm a coin roller. My dad was an avid coin hoarder and had me sorting, value assessing, and rolling coins by the time I was ten. Two decades later, several quart jars of nearly mint silver dollars made a huge farm payment because silver had inflated while the cattle market dropped. All that is changing. Now people laughingly collect state quarters that have less value than 'real' quarters used to before they changed the metal recipe in them.
Click to go to the site.
I pick up every nasty penny I see, roll it up, change it out. I've gotten several hundred dollars out of icky beaten up and green pennies over the last 30 years. Recently, my bank told me they were going to debit my account a penny after they unrolled them and found a green one, because it had to be pulled out of circulation. I said well then, I want that penny back. They were stunned. It had been mine until I handed it to them, it was legal tender while I held it, and them not honoring an exchange after taking it was stealing, wasn't it? They reversed the debit and credited a penny back to my account. What they do with it is their business. If it wasn't legal tender, they should have refused it in the first place, because I could have used it somewhere else and it would have still been worth something.
Ok, let's find out why I'm crazy. Even if you don't like math, you will find this astonishing.
According to worldometers, there are currently 325,312,554 (and growing) people living in the United States. Let's round that down to 325 million for easy math.
If one penny per year for every single person in the U.S. was dropped on the ground, never picked back up again to be used as legal tender, $3,250,000 would be lost. That is over 3 million dollars.
If we bumped that up to a penny for every person per month, that would be $39,000,000 lost in a year's time. That is nearly 40 million dollars.
But let's be conservative and assume all we lose a year is 3 million dollars. Now multiply that by ten years, that is 30 million dollars.
Let's play around with the per month thing times ten years. If every person in the U.S. dropped one penny per month for ten years, never to be picked up again, that comes up to $390,000,000, or nearly 4 *hundred* million dollars. That's nearly half a billion, guys.
When I see the same people. who fuss about taxes and government spending, leave coins on the floor or sweep coins into a dust bin or walk past coins in parking lots, I think about millions of dollars just sinking back into the earth. I once saw a coworker in a break room sweep a bunch of change out from behind vending machines into a dustpan and stopped him just before he tipped it into the trash. I bought an Egg McMuffin with that change. I got a free Egg McMuffin. I asked him why in the world would he throw money away like that, and, besides acting like it was too dirty to be touched, he sniffed down his nose on what a small amount it was anyway. And in my head I'm thinking You're sweeping a floor for minimum wage, and you think that money is too dirty and insufficient to care about.
This. Country. Is. Messed. Up.
Stop blaming governments and minimum wage and taxes and all that money y'all blow on salons and magazines and beer and cigarettes on why you're broke and can't make your bills. The attitude that money isn't worth picking up is what blows my mind.
I have filled up gas tanks on spare change, bought sheets of stamps with spare change, mailed Christmas boxes with spare change. I pick up spare change everywhere I see it, I roll it up, and I turn it in for usable cash. My generation is probably the last generation that will see 'free money' like this. Once it all goes digital, your chance to get free Egg McMuffins out of other people's lazy pockets is gone.
I sound like a bum, but I live in a decently nice house, and I drive a decently nice car. I just paid cash for $750 glasses, not because I'm rich, but because I don't waste that money on other stuff. I had my last pair of glasses for 8 years, the pair before that also lasted 8 years. If this pair also lasts 8 years, that's only $93.75 per year to wear really nice glasses. (I don't have vision coverage.) This year I got the full monty- anti-glare, no-line digital lenses, tiny little decorative jewels, and the cool Vogue swish. And yeah, I'll still stop and pick a nasty penny up in a parking lot.
I roll up about $40 a month in change. That is $480 a year. I've been doing that since we moved into this house, so round down to 20 years, that is $9,600 of free stuff I've gotten out of rolling other people's coins. I bet you guys buy lottery tickets thinking you'd be happy getting $20 out of them because so many are wastes of paper.
This could be the first country to go cashless "The Danish government has proposed that most stores could dump their cash registers from January 2016."
Like I said, once we go digital, no more free money.
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