I had $10.61 worth of pennies in the couch.

[undeterred]

Well, not really in the couch. But I took all the loose pennies that I had in various containers around the house and went to the machine at the grocery store and thats how many I had... there were a few dimes lost in there. They take 10%.

More money than I thought it would be actually.

[Throd]

1. I got a little over $55 in change cleaning out my girlfriend's car.

[mnhtnbb]

2. The bank will give you coin wrappers for free and you don't have

to pay the machine fee of 10%.

[undeterred]

3. Yeah, but I just didn't feel like it.

Some of the money was dirty and rusty and it was easier just pouring it into a machine than hand counting it. It was worth a dollar to get nine spendable dollars.

[bigwillq]

7. I like the machine better than the bank

I don't go inside banks. Do all my banking through the ATM.

[LynneSin]

4. I did that with all my coins but the pennies

I had so many fricking pennies they could have the 10% just so I didn't have to wrap close to 4000 pennies.

[mnhtnbb]

5. That's a LOT of pennies! We save coins in empty chocolate tins

and I have a little battery powered sorter that I use that makes
stacks ready to go into the appropriate denomination wrappers
we get free from the bank.

[Abin Sur]

6. My credit union doesn't charge a fee to use the coin counting machine

if you're a member.

[undeterred]

11. You know what, I didn't think of that.

I opened a credit union account recently and I didn't check to see if they had a machine. I used the one at the grocery store.

[Shagbark Hickory]

10. The nice thing about those wrappers is you can put in 50. Or 49 coins. Or 46

:+

[Xithras]

15. How long does it take to count out and hand roll 50 cents?

I just looked up a Youtube video of a guy rolling pennies "fast" by hand, and it took him about 3 minutes to sort 150 pennies out of a pile, stack them, and roll them. That's about 1 minute per roll. At 10%, the coin sorting machines are charging 5 cents per roll, or roughly 5 cents per minute of human labor.

So scale this up: 5 cents a minute = 300 cents per hour = $3 per hour.

In other words, paying Coinstar 10% is the equivalent of paying someone else $3 an hour to count, sort, and roll your pennies for you. I don't know about you, but I consider coin rolling to be a pain in the @$$, and will GLADLY pay someone else three bucks an hour to do it for me :)

[meegbear]

8. I have a container just for pennies and a container for the others ...

I'd guestimate at least $50 in pennies.

[PRETZEL]

9. I do something similar

I keep a jar in the bedroom. Everynite I empty my change into into it. Start each day with no change.

Usually adds up to about $60 a month. Wife and I use that on dinner one nite.

[RebelOne]

12. I have a piggy bank full of loose change.

Some day I will take all that change to my local Kroger money machine when I really need the money. So in the meantime, I am just thinking of it as a savings account.

[Betty88]

14. we have been slowly filling jars for years

We think of them as our ultimate emergency fund.

[gratuitous]

13. Did that with the loose coin offering

We do a loose coin offering for our church's district, and I redeem the coins each week for folding money to drop in the bank deposit slot (too many coins makes the deposit envelope too bulgy to fit). We took the coins in to the credit union a while ago, and the teller asked us how much we thought it came to. I guessed $76 and something. If she'd been a dishonest person, she could have said, "Wow, exactly right!" and given us the money. Instead she was honest and said it was over $200. Whoof!

[SwampG8r]

16. heeeeeyyyyyyyy?