Saving With Change

Creating a savings using your everyday change may not sound like a great idea, but it's actually a great way to get started on the road to savings. You may not have a good savings account, but you probably have change. Between all the household members, there is most likely change floating around. Change can usually be found in cars, on top of the washer, on table tops, drawers, bathroom sinks, and in couch cushions. Gather all this change and place it in one spot. You can use a jar, box, bowl, candy dish, piggy bank, or pretty much anything that can hold plenty of change.

Now that you have your container, and some change, continue adding to it. Each time you spend a dollar, the extra change should be put into your container. If you find change on the ground, pick it up and add it to your pile! If you want to add actual bills to the container, you can as this will increase your new savings drastically. However, focusing on the change is fine.

After a sustained period of time, count your change, place it into rolls and deposit into a savings account. If you rush this process and try to count after only a week or two, it may not equal much. But over time, your change container will fill. Our family collected all change for 4 months. After the 4 months, all change was counted and it was discovered that we had saved over $150! Not bad for just change that would have otherwise been thrown out.

Bank of America has a program called Keep the Change, that rounds up all debit card purchases to the nearest dollar and deposits the change into your savings account. This is a great program if you use this particular bank. Unfortunately, so far this is the only bank that does this, although I have heard of another company, though I'm not sure who, has something similar. This is a fantastic way to create a small savings for those that use their debit card often. Using this method, we were able to save $380 last year.

The biggest benefit to saving change is that it gets you into savings mode. The more you add to your savings, the easier it is to keep saving. It inspires your to go from simply change, to a few dollars at a time, to even more. Eventually saving money will be a natural habit and your savings will grow tremendously.

Saving your change is a fantastic starter to your savings. It inspires you to look around for spare change to add to your growing account. As it grows, you are impressed to start saving in larger increments. Eventually gaining a profound love of saving money and watching your account grow. Having a large savings is one key to being a financially prepared individual. You will stress less about money problems, as you will have a savings to depend on. All this peace of mind, just from a little spare change.