Last night we did a radical thing, we did a remarkable purge of something I didn\’t realize was weighing me down as heavily as it was. We got rid of our spare change. All of it.

We have had three large containers of coins kicking around the house for as long as I can remember. The first was an old glass bear-shaped peanut butter jar. The second was a war-torn cardboard cylinder from a bottle of booze, and the third was an old Tootsie Roll piggy bank which contained only pennies.

We had amassed so many coins that to roll them all was incredibly daunting. Did you know that you can\’t just dump a bag of coins on a bank teller? Let me rephrase that…  you can\’t go into the bank with loose change and expect them to pour it into a magic machine that will sort and count it. Weird huh?

We\’d actually tried to get rid of our change on three other occasions. We hauled it all the way to the coin counting machine at our local grocery store only to have to turn around and go home again after discovering that the machine was out of order. THREE TIMES.

Do you realize how heavy three jars of coins can be?

We thought we\’d try our luck again last week. We picked a grocery store that had a coin counting machine and crossed our fingers that it was fully operational. On the way to the store we all took turns guessing how much money we\’d collected. The jars had heft, and made good door stops, and could possibly kill someone if they were dropped from a second storey window. Hmm. I guessed $70.00. My husband guessed $150 (but then rescinded because it seemed crazily high) and the girls guessed somewhere in between.

It felt like the Price is Right, only a lot more exciting because it was our own money.

I was happy to see that the coin counting machine we chose was in good working condition.  Here’s a tip for you: read the fine print (this particular unit takes a mafia-like 11% cut!) before you pour your money into the slot. We went ahead, mostly because I couldn’t bear bringing all that change home again.  

Oh my, what a satisfying jingle it all made. I hung around for a few minutes while the girls shovelled more coins into the machine. I left them in the care of their father in order to get a jumpstart on the grocery shopping.

I was just about to leave the produce department when the three of them approached me with wide grins on their faces.

“Guess how much money we have!” they shouted.

I couldn\’t fathom.

They handed me the printout. We had a credit of $137.00 to use at the grocery store, and that’s after the 11% cut. Of that total, $30.07 was in pennies alone.

It was worth hauling our coins in to the store. The groceries pretty much paid for themselves that night. Pretty good for some spare change, isn\’t it?