save your loose change

Has anyone ever seen someone throw away pennies? I HAVE! And I don't mean that in the sense of simply wasting extra money. I mean that I have seen people physically throwing pennies in the trash. Granted, I've heard the arguments that pennies should be done away with already, but while they're still here, why not save them?

The smartest thing to do is to invest in paper penny rolls, but at the very least, keep a loose change jar. I have a bag of paper coin rolls for every denomination, and I save up all of my change until it's ample enough to warrant a bank deposit (and no, it's not weird or embarrassing to hand a bank teller multiple rolls of coins). Right now, I have almost $50 of loose change all rolled up. One side perk is that when I have to do laundry, I've already got a roll of quarters on hand. And I have my "worthless" pennies neatly stacked into 50 cent rolls, ready to become "real" money.

If coin rolls are too much work, the loose change jar suffices. Some banks have free coin deposit machines for their customers, but if yours doesn't, there's always Coinstar (although the cost of this convenience is 9% of your coins). If all else fails and you are too lazy to do any of the aforementioned things, just drop your loose change on the sidewalk. Someone will pick it up.