The Pennies Add Up: Saving Money on Little Things

I'm all for saving money on big things, but I'm also a firm believer that pennies matter, too. No, I don't drive all over town to save 2 cents a gallon on gasoline (Remember, time is money!), but I do try to be a wise steward in stretching our resources as far as I can. It's often the little things which make the biggest difference.

One tangible way we have saved our pennies ever since we were married is by having a loose change cup. Because almost every dollar, dime, and nickel which comes into our home as incomeis already set aside for a purpose in our budget, we don't have a lot of loose change. However, we went ahead and designated a spot for loose change in case we ever did have some. Believe it or not we've found that we often do have a few pennies, nickels, and dimes to add to our loose change cup each week. I'm not even always sure where they come from!

When Jesse was in law school and we had no extra cash for anything besides the bare necessities, we'd empty out this cup every few months and take it to the bank and use the $7 or so dollars we'd accumulated to do something special - like getting dinner and a movie. (Yes, we could do that for $7 - we'd either rent the movie at this place where we could get 2 movies for $1 or we'd get one from the library. And then we'd use coupons at a fast food restaurant to stretch the remaining $6 for a meal for the two of us.) We rarely ever had an extra $6-7, so this was a special treat.

Now that we have a small percentage of our income designated for dates and eating out, we decided to instead put our loose change cup money into savings. We let it build up for around a year and just recently took it to the bank. Guess how much money was in the cup? $35! I was rather surprised.