This year my family and I came to the realization that our household tech collection was having serious problems. Our teenager needs a tablet PC for school and our living room TV is an old projection model that’s more prone to inducing migraines than memorable family togetherness moments. Our younger children are also getting older and have been begging for MP3 players that they don’t have to share with each other.
We usually only make one high tech purchase per year. That’s all we can afford. At least that’s all we thought we could afford until recently when we started going back to some old fashioned ways of saving money and found out we could afford a lot more than we thought. The magic charm for this new found financial flexibility? The old fashioned coin jar.
We realized that we’d been using our money in high tech ways, and that was holding us back. We don’t use credit cards, but we do use debt cards. Somewhere along the way it became easier to just swipe and go when making purchases, large or small. Too easy. The problem with using debt cards instead of cash is that you end up forgetting exactly how little money you actually have. Keeping the cash in hand acts as a physical reminder of how much or how little we have to spend on any given thing. This, in turn, helps us hold on to our money in small increments that add up to larger savings. We collected up the debt cards and everyone in the family started to using cash.
Another thing we started doing was keeping our change. My grandmother used to say “count your pennies to make your pennies count”, and that’s great advice. While she meant to use exact change whenever possible we started looking at it from the opposite view. Instead of counting out our coins at the register to use exact change we started using whole bills and putting the change into our pockets. Then, when we get home, we empty our pockets into two jars: one for pennies and one for silver coins.
The point of separating the pennies from the rest of the coins is to avoid the illusion having saved more than you actually have. Pennies take up quite a bit of room in the jar, but aren’t worth that much when counted out. They’re worth saving, but don’t count on them when working towards the purchase of a new TV or tablet computer. A quart of quarters, on the other hand, is a sizable chunk out of any high tech bill. When then entire family is emptying their pockets into the jar it fills up surprisingly fast.
When the jar is full we take it down to the bank and deposit it into a separate account from the household account. The last thing we want to do after going to all that trouble of saving the coins is to get our money all mixed up again. The savings account it goes into is at the same bank as our regular accounts, which makes transferring the money into checking easy when comes to time to buy. Quarters might be good for saving, but I don’t plan on counting them out to buy a flatscreen TV.
Another thing we’re taking advantage of is buying last year’s model and layaway. While tablet computers are still relatively new, last year’s model of flatscreen will do just fine. We found a fantastic model from last year that was marked down to make room for the new models just as the seasonal layaway center opened. This allowed us to lock in the price and make payments with no interest.
This year we won’t have to settle for one tech purchase. We’ll be able to catch up on our high tech toys… thanks to the low tech coin jar.