Count 'em up!

None of us can afford to leave loose change lying around anymore given today's economy, but if YOU feel you can though, feel free to send it to me :-)

I came across a gallon-sized penny bank I had stuffed to the hilt the other day and decided it was time to cash in the coinage. Coinstar, those big green machines that count your coins for a fee, has been offering free coin counting if you convert the coins into gift certificates. We'd been using the one at our local Farmer Jack to get Amazon certificates until Farmer Jack shut down all of their stores several months ago. (you can also get gift cards for a lot of other sites including Starbucks, Circuit City, JCPenney, iTunes, Borders, Pier 1, Eddie Bauer, Cabela's, KB Toys, Old Navy, Timberland, Disney, Hollywood Video, AMC Theaters and Linens 'n Things).

I spent a while dumping and digging the pennies out of the bank and then decided to weigh them -- a whopping 74 pounds of pennies had been sitting in my closet for several years. My wife asked me how much I thought that would yield and I guessed about $50-$60.

We grabbed the paper bags we'd off loaded the copper into and headed off for the big green monster. It took quite a while to process them all, but in the end we traded 74 pounds of cents for about $75 in Amazon credit. We ended up using it for a new printer since ours had recently gone kaput.

AFTER I had made my guess on value, and AFTER we turned them in, I found a site that could have helped estimate the worth a little better than my pull-it-out-of-thin-air method. At Coincalc you tell it how many pounds of loose change you have and how many of each coin are in a small representative handful and it'll estimate the value of the whole lot. For my after-the-fact exercise, it was pretty close!

Now go gather all those piggy banks and put that money to use.

PS. Don't forget that if you do choose Amazon credit, come back to this site and search for your item by using the link on the right side -- then we both win. You get a great deal on a great product from Amazon and I get a little of your change back to keep my kids fed :-)