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Tuesday, December 22, 2015

Small Changes To Where You Put Spare Change

I'm the type of person who doesn't hang onto their spare change and I either give it to my mom (who is quite the penny pincher by the way with her routine coupon cutting) or I just leave it somewhere and when I decide to clean my room once in a while I'll feel amazed and wonder how I found random money that I've hidden some time in the past. The fourth category of organizing in Marie Kondo's book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing, is about こもの (romanized as 'komono,' meaning small articles). "The king of the komono category, coins can be found in the entrance hall, the kitchen, the living room, the washroom, on top of furniture, and inside drawers. Despite the fact that coins are perfectly good cash, they are treated with far less respect than paper money. It seems strange that they should be left lying around the house where they are of no use at all." (Kondo 113). She makes an extremely good point and it gave me motivation to go around and dig for the cash I left around. Kondo mentions that every time she helps people reorganize and declutter their house, they tend to find coins not only in their wallet, but also in couches and other places around their home and it totals up to a good bag full of forgotten change (Kondo 113).

Kondo explains that "If you put them [coins] in a piggybank, you are simply transferring the place where they will be ignored, People who have lived in the same house for a long time are particularly prone to forgetting their little cache of coins....I beg you to rescue those forgotten coins wasting away in your home by adopting the motto 'into my wallet!'" (Kondo 113-114). I definitely went scavenging for my childhood piggy banks and random containers where I stored money in when I was younger and I definitely found a bunch of coins that I could have been spending (though the total doesn't add up to that much unfortunately). 



I think the only con with this method however, is that coins definitely bulk up your wallet and it makes it more heavy. I'm not really the type of person that cares about those things because my wallet in particular has a specific pocket meant to store coins but that is something to mention if you're a type of person that doesn't want to carry around that weight. The obvious pro is that you have some more money to spend, no matter how small and if you don't want to carry around coins, just simply use them when you buy things.

What do you guys do with your spare change and will you try this method out now?

Kondō, Marie. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing. Trans. Cathy Hirano. N.p.: Ten Speed, 2014. Print.




4 comments:

  1. I've been meaning to try this for so long! I always keep my spare change in a bag, but it is kind of wasteful to just leave it there. I try to always give the correct change when buying something at the store; it's the easiest way for me to use it up!

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    1. I've been trying that recently and I think the only issue is that using coins gives me anxiety when someone is in line behind me and waiting to pay! Other than that, it's kind of the only way I'm able to use them up.

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  2. This is smart, but difficult for me. Whenever I am in a store and receive change, I don't have enough time to open my wallet and the zipper pocket and put the change in there and then zip it up because I am trying to get out of the way and grab by bags so the next person in line can check out. Usually what I will do is keep it in my hand and when i get back into my car, I will put it in the little cubby where I keep spare change. The problem with this is that I never end up actually spending it. Your "into the wallet" technique seems useful, but I think that what my mom does is genius. She has a large clear container in her closet and whenever she has spare change she takes it home and puts it in there. Then at the end of every year when it has gotten quite full, she takes the whole thing and puts it through those big machines and they give her cash for it. She could get away with just never spending that change and leaving it to lie around, but this is the easiest way to be sure that she will spend it.

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    1. What your mom does sounds like a great idea but I'm a pretty forgetful person so I end up finding random cash everywhere when my younger self thought I would find the stash when I have a 'rainy day'. If I were to try your mom's technique, I think it would definitely work but I would probably put the jar on my desk to keep it fresh in my mind! Thanks for the idea!

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