About a week or so ago I sold a climbing rope on eBay. The item sold for about $100. The winning bidder sent a money order to me as payment. This is good for a couple reasons, but the main reason that I like receiving money orders for large amounts as opposed to PayPal, is because of the fee’s. I have sold the same rope to other people who paid with PayPal and it cost between $6 – $10 in fees – which cuts into my profits!
So anyway, I cashed the money order on Saturday and shipped out the rope to him. I got home and was thinking about what I was going to do with the $100 cash I now had in my pocket. I like to use cash as opposed to credit/debit cards, just because then I have the feeling of “oh well, I only have this much left, so I probably shouldn’t get that” instead of saying “CHARGE IT!”. I know people will argue with this mentatlity, but I don’t care – everyone has their own ways and systems. Anyway, I decided that I didnt want to keep the $100 on me plus the other cash that I had. So, I had the idea of starting my own tip jar.
Basically, anytime I have extra cash on me that I don’t want to constantly carry around with me, I can put it in the tip jar. Or if I get everything I need to done in a day or accomplish a lot of tasks, I can reward myself wth a tip from my own wallet. This is nice because then when I need a couple extra bucks for lunch I can just grab it out real quick and be on the way. Or, if I don’t touch it for a while, it will add up and all of the sudden be like money I never knew I had. Kind of like a deposit from your paycheck into your retirement account – after a while, you start to not even miss the money that should be there. On Saturday I put in about $30.00 to save for another time. This is going to be a great little stash when the time comes and I need to use it!
On top of being my personal tip jar, I use the same container (an old Nalgene bottle), as my spare change holder. So when it starts to fill up, I’ll cash all the change in and have some nice pocket money to spend on something new. I’ll be saving up for a new LCD widescreen monitor, fyi.
I’m sure many of you throw your coins in a jar or something to keep them all in one place, but what about other cash that you don’t want to carry around with you all the time? Do you tip yourself? Deposit it in the bank? Or just hold onto it and spend it?
I have an actual piggy bank from my childhood that I use for just this purpose! The great thing about using a piggy bank is that I have to actually unscrew it to access the cash inside, so I’m not as tempted to break into it for minor things and instead can save up.
As I also try to primarily use cash like yourself, another awesome savings venue is to keep all spare change in a hard to get to location. Personally over the past 10 years I have almost filled a 1920’s Glass Culligan style water bottle… The thing weighs over 100 pounds.
Why hard-to-get-to? The opening of this thing makes it virtually impossible to get any amount of change out of it. Do not dip into this change and it will accumulate rapidly.
My wife and I are going on a vacation in August, and I suspect that the spare change should equal close to $1,000. Pretty amazing what a few cents can do. 🙂
In the future, I am going to cash in my change more often and put it in a CD or other hard-to-get-to interest bearing account.
Great comments guys! I agree that keeping your change jar in a hard to get to place or in a container that will ake a little time to open is an extra deterent from being able to quickly access it. Mine is sitting on a shelf behind my desk at home – this means I see it every time I go to my desk and sit down. It’s more tempting to empty when their are dollar bills in then just change; but I am going to hold out as long as I can (which may only be a week more or so HAHA).