Keep the change!

How often do we find change laying around the house? What do you do with those pennies you get back from the McDonalds drive thru window? I would just chuck it in the car 'ashtray' and think nothing about it. Kevin has this really big container of coins that he has collected over the years. One day, we just went through the car and the whole apartment and cleared out all the spare change laying around. We brought that, together with Kevin's container of coins and headed to the Coinstar machine at our neighborhood grocery store.

For those of you who not familiar with the Coinstar machine, it's a machine that counts all your coins/spare change and converts them to either bills or e-certificates for various merchants. You can also choose to donate them to your favorite charity. There is a service charge of 8 cents per $1 if you choose to convert your coins to bills. However, the service is free of charge if you were to exchange the coins to e-certificates. Among the participating merchants are Amazon, Starbucks, CVS, Borders, iTunes, Lowes, JC Penny, Disney, AMC Theaters and Overstock.

All you need to do is choose how you would want to convert your coins, pour in all your coins into the machine and let the machine do the counting. We chose to convert our coins to an e-certificate from Amazon. Once the machine finishes counting your coins, a printout of the total amount with a redemption code will be printed out. Look at the amount of coins we had in that containers! 979 pennies, 66 dimes and 31 nickles!!!

So, what did we get from Amazon with our 979 pennies, 66 dimes and 31 nickles? Well, we got an EVA case for our portable hard drive. We have been wanting to get that since my parents got us a portable HD for Christmas. Now we have a case to carry it around!

We also got a Mama Mia DVD! It's just one of those shows that is worth buying :D So, we bought two cool items from Amazon with the coins that we have in that container. Not too bad for spare change laying around the house! The next time you have spare change in your pockets, think twice before you just chuck it somewhere and leave it laying around until you forget about it! You mighjt be able to buy something coool with that change!