Karen Datko, lead blogger, is a veteran journalist in small-town Montana, where her mortgage is $310 a month.
Teresa Mears is a veteran writer in Florida. She doesn't clip coupons, but she does shop at Goodwill.
Donna Freedman, our "Living With Less" columnist, is a student, freelance writer and handywoman in Washington.
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Why you should pick up that penny
Found coins add up slowly, but they DO add up.
In the past week I've already found $1.05. Looks like it's going to be a good year for what blogger Candace Baltz-Smylie calls "Dirty Money."
She means that in a good way, of course.
Candace, who blogs at SugarMama Baking Company, also picks up dropped money -- about $30 worth in the past eight months. The funds paid for a recent shopping trip: a rotisserie chicken, six heads of romaine lettuce, six pounds of Bosc pears and a box of trash bags.
"It also could have added up to a whole month’s worth of school lunches for my son," she writes.
Like me, the blogger lives without a car. Walkers get lots of chances to pick up money. A few weeks ago I found a small pile of change in the middle of a city sidewalk: 99 cents, mostly pennies but also three dimes and a quarter. Not scattered, mind you, but heaped up. I wonder what the story was there?
Not far from my house is a corner where a woman often sits with a sign asking for help. Passing motorists sometimes hand money through their car windows. As I walked past one day I noticed a penny on the ground. Then another. And another. In all, I picked up 25 cents. Does she toss them aside at the end of the day? Do some mean-spirited drivers throw pennies as a sign of derision?
The original "See a penny? Pick it up!" post had more than 1.657 million views and more than 4,800 responses. Some readers thought it was smart to pick up Dirty Money. Other people thought it was, well, dirty. Eeewww, don't touch it!
I hate to burst your bubble, as it were, but all money is dirty. Recent research indicates that flu viruses can survive for a surprising amount of time on paper money. And I've personally seen adults removing cash from their bras and their shoes. Eeewww, indeed.
Candace's husband is one of those folks who thinks it's gross to pick up found coins. However, she notes, "he still eats the food I buy with the dirty money."
This year, I'm rounding my $34.54 find up to $50 and sending the check to a local food bank. I doubt they'll care where it came from. Dirty money or not, it'll still help buy some groceries. Just something to think about the next time you see a nickel on the sidewalk.
Related reading:
- Is finding money stealing?
- A different way to think about money
- Get free money from banks
- Why I gave a guy a dollar
Donna, I've contributed to "found money" blogs & 'smart spending threads in the past. Kudos to you for giving it away. Found Money is not something I give away. I mostly find it in the neighborhoods where the majority of people are on the dole, habitually, and generationally. They can't stoop to pick up a penny, but they happily will pick a working man, tax-payer's pocket every month, more often as the state & local governments allow. No, its "finder's keepers" in this case: If I find it and expend the effort to pick it up, I keep it. Goes to a dedicated savings account at a local credit union.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a Scrooge. I write a check to a local charity every month, and give tangible, physical donations to the local woman's shelter, food bank, animal shelter on a regular basis. Almost $30 found ytd, plus tokens for Chuckie Cheese & some other places I can't even identify, (they're solid brass and go into the brass scrapmetal can), and some gold jewelry, all broken and run-over, found in the street or parking lots, ($53 the last time I cashed in the broken jewelry, 10k & 14k gold).
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