What do you do with your small change?

I usually only have change like that when I work. We get a 35 cent deal on hot chocolate and coffe, so if I got enought to buy one at the end I throw it in the change jar.

We have penny, nickle + dime, and quarter jars. They are big so they have never filled up. If I ever owe someone who has pissed me off money, I will use the pennies to pay them off.

@lilikoi Awesome!

I put it in the inner pocket of my coat, from which it may pass into street musician’s boxes, the hands of beggars or street newspaper salesmen, charity boxes or door-to-door charity collectors, or whoever else actually has any use for little coins.
It’s more convenient than keeping it in my wallet. And it’s important for good deeds to be convenient and easy; if they’re a bother, they usually don’t happen.

I have jars and cans of change. I live in USA but have one jar of foreign coins, must weigh about 2 pounds / one kilo. The USA coins I take to the bank for deposit. Last time I went four years ago it weighed about forty pounds in many coffee cans.

Large glass jar for pennies, silver goes into a piggy bank, and is used when funds are short. Sometimes the local elementary school has a Penny War, and I’ve had arrangements with neighborhood kids to donate my pennies to their class.

The way a penny war works is each class has a jar. Pennies are +1 point, silver change is -5, -10, -25 points. You put pennies in your class jar and put silver change in other class’ jars as “sabotage.” The class with the most points at the end “wins” and the prize is usually a pizza party lunch. No paper money allowed. I’ve seen it done as voting as to which college basketball team rules, rather than a competition between classes. One year, the school raised $5,000 for the Red Cross with a penny war.

We all know change is good, but not rattling around in my pocket. I have a coin-counting device at home, and when the total gets up to around $50, I cash out at the supermarket (6% service fee) and treat myself to something fun.

I keep it till it builds up and then I will take a few to the bank. I usually keep some around for emergency. I find if I keep emergency bills at home it disappears too quickly. The coins hang around for a very long time. Its the only currency I hate carrying around so at least in the house I know its safe. I keep in in rolls. Figured if I ever need emergency cash while I’m at home then its better than not having any at all.

Goes in the my drawers! lol

I have three discarded candy and peanut tins at work. Pennies, nickles and dimes, and quarters. I refer to them as my “401K Fund.”

Eventually I use them for the soda machine. Except the penny jar, and that one is getting heavy.

We save them in a jar. We live paycheck to paycheck, so sometimes that little extra that we can cash in will buy us a few groceries until the next payday comes.

I got an old folgers coffee container and made it into a cute little jar where all the extra deflated U.S. metal currency goes! Quarters go into my coat pocket for the pop machine at work :-)

Spare change starts out at the bottom of my purse. I delve into it whenever we are out and the kids ask to donate money to whatever charity has a collection tin on display in the store where we happen to be shopping. When my purse starts to get too heavy, I dump all the change into a big glass bowl in my room. My husband has two jars, one at home and one at work, that he uses to collect change. A few days before Christmas, we gather it all up and take it to the coin machine at the grocery store. The cash gets divided between our three kids, with the understanding that they deposit the money into their savings accounts. It’s usually around a hundred dollars total. One year there was $150 in change!

I got the idea for doing that from my dad. He kept a change bowl in his closet when my brother and I were kids, and on our birthdays he’d give us the contents of the change bowl. Our birthdays were spread out enough so it was pretty even, but our kid’s birthdays aren’t so we divide up the change at Christmas.

loll..excuse me, goes in my drawers!

The children’s lunch money.

Put them in a container and to the bank they go. It usually ends up being over $120 when the container is full.

Spend it.

I have a jar that counts them for me. It’s nowhere near full.

You could do this with it.

I put it in a Velkopopovický Kozel beer mug. When the mug is overflowing, I take it to Coinstar and get an Amazon.com gift certificate. If you get a gift card, Coinstar doesn’t take a counting fee and, well, I can always use an Amazon gift card.

I eat them.

@EmpressPixie What’s the minimum amount for an Amazon gift card? I have a lot of pennies, but I don’t know if it adds up to enough to get anything.

@mrentropy I don’t think there is one. I just looked on the website and cannot find one. And there are lots of gift cards you can choose from, I just go with Amazon because it’s easy and useful for me.

@EmpressPixie Thanks :) Maybe I can stack a bunch of gift cards on Amazon.

It goes into a pickle jar if it’s upstairs, or a tin if it’s downstairs. Eventually, it gets rolled and deposited into our savings account. There’s always some in the car in case we have to take a toll road.

I work with a guy who saves his change for a year and then uses it to make a principal payment on his mortgage.

All my change (coins) goes into a container, what ever is in my pocket.
I call it my college fund. When it gets full to the top.

I cash it in and the cycle starts all over again. :-)

I have a spare change pot that I throw all my coins into. It started life as a fabric softener bottle but now it accomodates my pennies!

I don’t like small change. Like @ChazMaz all my change goes into a container. Once a year this goes into some collection box.

We just throw ours into the cup holder in the car and then Hubby spends it on breakfast or lunch at the drive-through.

We keep it in a giant plastic coke bottle (change container). We use it in case of emergencies. But, ideally we’d fill it up and use it for a vacation. We also put change in my sons piggy banks (not sure why, but he has at least 5 of them…people like to give piggy banks.)
I have a habit of not taking my change when I buy things, because I’m usually chasing my son…so it gets left as a tip at most places.

Pennies go in a vanity drawer but all else goes in my change purse, I can feed myself daily on spare change so it’s never been overlooked and treated as pocket lint. Using change is a frugal pet peeve of mine.

I keep my loose change in a coin wallet and spend it on things like soda (at work, the employee vending machines only charge 35 cents).
When I have an overabundance of pennies, as is bound to happen, I divide them into those that have a lot of copper in them, and those that do not, based on the year. I place the copper-plate pennies in a jar, and the copper alloy (?) pennies in a drawer. Once the jar is full, I’ll take it to one of those Coinstar things. I don’t have a plan yet for the other pennies; they’re actually worth more than $1/100th, but I need to find a way to get that back.