Financing the Move.

Alright, the big move (while not going as fast as I would like) is paid for.

At the end of every day, I take whatever change is in my pocket and throw it in a empty plastic slurpee cup. Then, once a year, I take it to my bank, where they've got one of those auto-counting machines (like coinstar, but without the fee. for what it's worth, you can also skip the coinstar fee (9%?!) by opting for payment as a gift card in a lot of cases, so if you already drink a lot of starbucks, it's almost as good as cash. Heck, keep an eye out for when amazon gift cards are an options. They sell nearly everything on there.)

This usually amounts to a hundred bucks or so. It's not the optimal savings method, as you aren't earning interest, but it's a system that works for me. Annual windfall, as it were.

Well, apparently either I let it slide over a year this time (I don't think I did), or my attempt to use cash more (I feel purchases more when handing over a bill rather than just sliding a card.), rendered the slurpee cup insufficient for capacity. So a second slurpee cup was added. And a couple large empty cottage cheese tubs. And then some other plastic bin. And those had to be emptied out earlier in the year (I choose a tripled grocery bag) And then they were filled again.

So I dumped them today into a second tripled grocery bag, fetched the first, and dragged them (very nearly literally) to the car.

Coin machine at first branch was out of service. Went and picked up Manya from work and drove to another branch.

Aha, change counting machine in service.

Her jaw dropped after I tossed in the first few handfuls and got up to about $30. Second bag on the floor at my feet, I positioned one bag over the little bin and tore into it. Handful of rejected coins. Picked out the arcade tokens and bits of lint, threw the rest back in the bin. Accepted this time. Repeat with second bag. Printed out the receipt and brought it to the teller. Said I wanted to deposit it into my account. She was surprised by the amount.

So while not effectively any more wealthy than when I woke up this morning (cash on hand, as it were), the untracked balance of savings of $937.30 was added to the official ledger.

Something I'd not considered about lugging around nearly $1000 in loose change? It's really, really heavy. Like back spasms all evening heavy. Ow.

But, this easily covers the costs of paying for some people to move my heavier crap for me, as well as the gas spent searching for apartments, the application fee at the new place, boxes...I guess that's it expense wise so far.

As far as the whole saving change thing goes, I've been doing it for years. Once paid rent with the proceeds. I don't think I'm alone at this, I occasionally see some guy standing by the coinstar machine with an empty water cooler bottle mostly full of change (which he had to bring in using a dolly), trying to figure out how he's going to get the change into the bin. And considering Coinstar's stock performance over the last 10 years, it seems like they're doing alright for themselves.