Save your pennies and pay off your mortgage!

Posted: July 7, 2012

Here's a great story out of Massachusetts about a man who paid off his mortgage in pennies. The interesting thing is how many pennies that actually involved!

He used 62,000 pennies to pay off the remainder of his mortgage ($620). He said he had been saving 2.5 pennies per day and apparently they really added up! Click HERE to read the full article.

We have a coin jar with money I find in the washer, couches and the bottom of my purse, but I am certain that there is not even $100 in it. I guess I still have a lot of saving to do before we could make a mortgage payment with the coin jar.

Do you save change? If so, what do you eventually use it for?

31 Comments

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We save our change in a bank with the counter on it. Usually we save until we have a trip planned out and the change then becomes the spending money. 4 years ago we had $400+ in change and took a 10 day motorcycle trip ... now we have our sites set on a trip to Puerto Rico in Dec of 2013.. so looks like lots of spending money for us!!!!

sohappy
July 11, 2012 4:21 p.m.

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I have been saving change since I became a single parent years ago. It has managed to keep me afloat during some tough times. Now both of my children are grown and my son does the same thing. We even had a challenge on who had saved the most! It was a blast because he just knew he had me beat...but little did he know, I hide items well!

Seeminglyopposed
July 10, 2012 2:33 p.m.

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I save my change to use at the farmers market! A few dollars in coins actually can buy a lot of produce. And the vendors don't mind as they get a lot of people with $20 bills!

grkmiley
July 9, 2012 11:46 p.m.

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We have a container for change, but there's rarely more than $5 in there. I've always preferred to pay with exact change if I have it, or at least so that all I get back is quarters. My husband doesn't function the same, hence the container. About once a month, I take it to the bank and make a token deposit to our emergency fund (on top of my regular deposits). Our emergency fund, for almost 2 years running, has within $50 of whatever emergency falls on our lap at any given time. It's kind of creepy. Pay for the emergency, balance drops to zero, rebuild. Doesn't matter if it's $1k for a home repair, or $200 for tires, whatever we need, it's there, barely.

Oxymoron02
July 9, 2012 1:27 p.m.

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We saved all of our change for about two years (of course this was fourteen years ago). We saved enough in change that we rolled ourselves to pay for a trip to Las Vegas. We have been saving change ever since and the money will either be used to buy a boat (my husband's idea) or my fantasty trip to Hawaii.

jcook2
July 9, 2012 12:34 p.m.

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My husband has always been good at saving change. He purchased my "promise ring" from change he saved after he realized how much money he had been spending in video game machines! Four years later, he had saved enough to purchase my engagement ring! Over the years, saved change has served as down payments on vehicles and getting through the tough times when the economy took a turn! Although its been harder to save those coins during the past four years, he still does it! I'm very proud of him for keeping the tradition going!

twsw
July 8, 2012 7:27 p.m.

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We have a mason jar on one of our dressers. Once its filled, we take it to our bank (fifth third) and use the change counter. We use the money to treat ourselves to a nice dinner out.

Kathy

chesirekat1964
July 8, 2012 2:10 p.m.

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All of our change goes towards our son's college fund. That is all we can do at this point but it seems to be averaging $25-30 a month.

pss3
July 8, 2012 1:48 p.m.

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We do save our change...and we give that to the kids for their vacation "spend" money. Our totals have ranged between $120-200....I read an article several months back that the average household has about $137 in change in the house, car, laudnry room, old purses, couch, etc.