As regular readers know, I pick up coins (and sometimes bills) all year long. The found money goes into a vase my daughter got from the free box at a yard sale when she was little. At the end of the year, I round up the amount and donate it.
Last year my found money take was pretty paltry: just $5.88, probably due to the pandemic*. For example:
Work slowdowns/job loss might have made some folks more apt to pick up those quarters they dropped. When times were better, they just let ’em roll.
People weren’t shopping in-person as much, for fear of contagion. Fewer shoppers means fewer chances for dropped coins.
And since I spent a whole lot of 2020 hiding away from the invisible** threat, I wasn’t in the stores much myself.
To some extent, those things were still true in the past year. In addition, the country has been plagued by a coin shortage in stores and banks so folks were using less cash. Maybe that’s why I kept thinking that 2021 was going to be another low year for found money. Imagine my surprise when I counted up: The vase held $10.11 – almost 72 percent more than in 2020.
Generally I donate the rounded-up amount either to Feeding America or the Food Bank of Alaska. This year, however, I’m going to focus on hunger in the rural town where I grew up.
When I was a kid, our town wasn’t what you’d call prosperous. But everyone had jobs, usually because they farmed or worked at nearby factories. Many people also grew a garden and/or picked produce at local farms. Fishing (creeks, ponds and the nearby Delaware Bay), hunting (deer, duck, pheasant, turkey) and trapping (muskrats caught for pelts were sometimes eaten) were also common. (My grandparents never bought meat. Fun fact: I have eaten deer-meat sloppy joes.)
And now? The factories are closed, inflation is rampant, the population is mostly aged – and the little church of my childhood has a food pantry.
Charity begins at home
I remember the church raising money for other people, such as a nursing home and a ranch for at-risk kids. Now church members – and others in the community – might be going hungry. Or would be, if not for the food pantry.
That’s why I’m giving my found money to that church this year: to keep people I know from going without.
Yep, some of the men and women I saw each week as a child are still there. Any time I visit my brother, I go to our old church and familiar faces still show up every Sunday that they’re able. They still remember me and my family*** even though they’re in their 70s, 80s or maybe even 90s.
These days the pews hold only a couple of dozen parishioners, and sometimes fewer. Most are elderly and many seem quite frail. I wonder if they can still hunt, fish, trap, dig a garden or hit the pick-your-own places. I also wonder how far their Social Security or pension checks stretch when grocery prices are reaching for the rafters, and propane or fuel oil currently run an average of up to $3.68 a gallon.
Back in the day, elders might have had their grown children bring them fish, game meat or garden produce, or do most of the work in their parents’ plots. But as with many small towns, the younger people have mostly fled to better opportunities in bigger places.
That’s not to say that the worshippers I see have all been left entirely to their own devices. However, there’s enough need for the church to have to step in. Thus I’ve decided that my charity should begin at home. Sure, it’s been 40-plus years since I lived there, but it’s where I came up. You never really lose that feeling of home.
Again, the food pantry is likely also serving people I don’t know, either because they started going to church there after I left for good at age 21, or because they don’t go to this church but are still being helped. When Jesus said “Feed my sheep,” I’m pretty sure He meant all sheep – not just the ones within the sound of His voice.
Found money = fund money?
Here’s the 2021 take:
One $1 bill
15 quarters
35 dimes
14 nickels
116 pennies
The Coinstar machine was the source of much of the specie I gleaned. I also found coins (and a one-dollar bill) on sidewalks, shop floors, and in vending machines and the change cups at self-checkout counters.
What you do with your serendipitous specie (or folding green) is up to you, of course. Among other things, you could:
Donate it. That could be to a favorite charity, a personal cause or the collection plate at your house of worship.
Deepen your pantry. Once prices have gone up they probably won’t come back down, so buy at today’s prices for tomorrow’s meals. (Add more to your larder with help from the “groceries” section of my archives.)
Pay for something. The stores where I live are sharply limiting cash purchases, leaving only one or two lanes open for anything other than plastic. If you just want a can of soup or a pair of shoelaces, the merchant might be delighted to get a couple of bucks’ worth of change as payment.
Fund a going concern. Add it to your emergency fund, early mortgage payoff fund, retirement fund or any other financial endeavor. Or maybe start a shorter-term goal, such as a “next year’s holiday shopping” fund or an “I need new glasses soon” fund.
Use it as seed money. Don’t have an EF or any of those other endeavors? Start one with your found money. Fun fact: If you save $2.75 a day for a year, you’ll have $1,000. The $10.11 that I found is almost four days’ worth of this kind of saving.
Sure, that might seem slow. But look at it this way: Suppose you save nothing at all every day for a year. At the end of the year you’ll have…nothing. Remember that “save $2.75 a day” can also mean “find ways not to spend $2.75 a day.” The site archives can help you there, too.
Readers: Do you pick up money? If so, how do you use it?
* Man, am I sick of typing that phrase.
**It became all too visible in November 2020, when it killed my dad.
***The only one of us still down there is my brother, along with his family. That’s an odd feeling.
Related reading:
- See a penny? Pick it up!
- 34 discarded dimes
- Filthy lucre
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