How to cash in your loose change without LOSING your loose change

I’ve got loose change on my bedside nightstand.  I’ve got loose change near my computer monitor.  I’ve poured loose change into two vintage Uncle Sam 3-Coin Register toy banks (actually, one of them is a Maple Leaf 3-Coin Register Bank for my Canadian loose change).

The problem with collecting all this loose change is that you can’t just take a bag of it down to the bank and have them turn it into paper money or deposit it in your bank account.  You end up with dirty looks as the bank teller has to physically count every penny and nickel, while you’ve got customers behind you staring at their watches and giving you dirty looks.  Oh, and don’t EVEN think of bringing a bank your change in wrappers – automatically they assume that if you’ve brought them what looks like a roll of quarters, they just know that you’ve given them 48 pennies sandwiched between two quarters on each end of the roll.  And then they make you write down your bank account number on the coin wrapper – just in case there’s any issue and they want to come back to you and accuse you of swindling.

Some banks do have a customer-available coin-counting machine; I remember having to use a Commerce Bank in Harrisburg, Pa. and discovering that they had such a machine.  They actually had a promotion going on at the time, in that if you could guess how much coinage you had, then dumped it in the machine, and if the total amount calculated was within a dollar of your final total, you received a small gift from the bank (usually a bank-branded mouse paid or jar opener) and the total amount of your coinage in more manageable dollars and larger denominated coins.  They don’t have any of those personal coin-counters in Albany, and as much as I love visiting Harrisburg (their state library has the microfilms for most of Pennsylvania’s newspapers, which is essential for any research projects I need to undertake), I have to find another option for my loose change.

Want to take your change to the grocery store?  You’ve probably seen those CoinStar machines at your local Price Chopper or Hannaford.  You can pour your loose change into the CoinStar machine, and they’ll count it up for you and provide you with a gift certificate, which you can take to the customer service desk and cash in, or use at the register to deduct the gift certificate from your grocery purchase.  Only problem there – you’re actually paying the CoinStar machine 8 9/10 cents per dollar to count your money for you.  So you dump in a dollar, you get 91 cents back.  Definitely not a fan of that.

But there’s one thing those CoinStar machines CAN do to make sure you receive all the money you so diligently collected.

Before you dump your coins into the CoinStar machine, check to see if the CoinStar machine offers the ability to receive your gift certificate as part of an eCertificate.  Several online retailers, including Amazon.com, iTunes and the like, will provide you with a par value certificate that you can use to buy things online.  So if you dump in $24.75 of loose change, you can get $24.75 worth of iTunes downloads or put $24.75 toward the purchase of something on Amazon.com.

Not all grocery store CoinStar machines offer this option, and you need to pour in at least $5.00 to get the eCertificate.  I found this out the hard way.  I thought I had a lot of loose change to dump into the CoinStar machine, and I was actually 15 cents short of $5.00.  I went to a cashier and asked if she could break a $1 bill into four quarters, she did, and I returned to the CoinStar machine to dump one of the quarters into the hopper and get my Amazon.com certificate.

Unfortunately for me, the CoinStar machine decided that it took too long for me to get past that $5.00 barrier, and instead dumped me with a regular change slip instead – after it took out its 39 cents.  So make absolutely sure that if you’re dumping in a whole lot of coins, you need to clear at least $5 if you want an eCertificate.