It’s Called Currency

I’ll bet that you regularly carry around more than a dollar in change in your pockets or purse, rarely pulling it out to make a purchase. Most people simply rack up coins, drop them in any convenient place, and forget that they actually have value as money. Do you have coins on your dresser, your desk, on the floor of various rooms in your home? Are they cluttering up the console and door handle of your car? Are you surrounded by money? Then why don’t you seem to have any when you need it?

Get a jar and gather up all those coins in one place. Then vow to keep adding to that jar until it is full, or until one year has passed. When one of those conditions has been met (full jar or a year later), get some of those paper sleeves for rolls of coins and count your money. No, do NOT take the jar to one of those fee-charging automatic counting machines. This is money you’re paying yourself. Don’t pay someone else to count it for you.

If you’ve managed to drop 50 cents a day into your change jar for a year, you will have $182.50. To you, this will feel like “found money” because you didn’t have to work to save it. There are millionaires out there who simply never spend their change and routinely drop all their coins—and even their single dollar bills—into a change jar every day. When they tally up, it may be $400 or more.

This is money that would otherwise be slipping through the cracks of your life, leaking away on nothing at all. Simply gathering it into one place and treating it like money will help it to grow. With almost no effort, you can create a little financial oasis to help you through a minor crisis before it grows into a major emergency.

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