That’s right – I don’t spend my $5-bills.
Many years ago, I heard a story on Oprah about how one of her guests never spent the change in his pocket and would empty it into a little jar by the side of his bed each night. The coins added up to rough $700 in a year, so he invested them. When it was time for his child to attend university eighteen years later, the investment account was worth $73,000!
Now, I don’t know what he invested in nor do I have any idea of his rates of return. What I do know is that the lesson I took was that a person can live without their small change and that it can grow to a decent sum if left alone to do its job. So I stopped spending my coins in 2012 or thereabouts. Every time my purse gets extraordinarily heavy and I start to feel shoulder pain, I know that it’s time to empty the coin from my wallet. In Canada, we have $1-loonies and $2-twonies so the coin adds up quickly. I’ve removed anywhere from $7 – $30 from my wallet in at any one time. Unlike the fellow on Oprah, I use my coin to pay for the expenses that come along with Christmas. In my world, $700 can go a long way!
In 2017, I started a new little savings strategy. I decided to stop spending my $5-bills. I figured that not spending $5-bills wouldn’t have an impact on my life in any significant way. The sacrifice was hardly worth my attention. I resolved that $5-bills would not go into my wallet and that I wouldn’t spend them if at all possible. And I told myself that if I honestly and truly couldn’t live the life I wanted without those $5-bills, then I would simply go back to spending them and my experiment would be over. This is what happened – in one year, I saved $885 which is enough to cover 80% of an out-of-town wedding for a dear friend.
I made the mistake of telling one of my friends what I was doing. He scoffed and rolled his eyes, but he was suitably impressed when I told him how much I’d managed to save. The other little lesson I learned from this experiment was that I cannot always count on the people who love me best to agree with every financial decision that I make. C’est la vie! I have to make my own decisions and I have to live with their consequences.
I try to spend cash whenever I can, partly because the odds are good that I’ll get a $5-bill in my change. In the world of online payments and credit card transactions, cash is becoming less and less common. Still, I do buy coffees and snacks at work. The idea of using my credit card for such small purchases does not appeal to me, although I recognize that others don’t share my view. To my mind, smaller purchases warrant the use of cash. And when I get back $5-bills, I’m very happy. Those bills don’t even make it into my wallet. They go to the bottom of my purse then they are transferred to a secret spot in my house once I get home.
Even though I don’t have a particular use for these bills, I like knowing that they give me an option. The 2017 stash wasn’t saved expressly for the wedding. However, I immediately said yes to the wedding invitation and I didn’t have to worry about how I was going to pay for the unplanned trip. I knew that I had just under $1000 that didn’t have a job yet. This $885 was separate and apart from the rest of the monies that I need to run my life. It was bonus money, if you will, and it was accumulated slowly over the space of 365 days. There was no particular purpose for this money other than allowing me to spend it guilt-free on whatever I wanted.
I’ve no idea how big the 2018 stash will be, nor do I know how it will be spent. What I do know is that on January 1, 2019, I will open up my secret spot, count my money and be very happy knowing that small sacrifices over the previous year have provided me money to do something fun and frivolous!