Find a penny, pick it up? If I recall correctly, the original limerick was not meant to be a question, but I’ll ask it nonetheless: do you pick up spare change?

My answer: sometimes. But I discriminate between the coins.

A quarter? I’ll almost always pick up a quarter, especially back in the day when I had no in-unit washer/dryer. In those days, the value of a cache of spare quarters far exceeded the standard $0.25 valuation.

Nickels and dimes? Might depend on just how shiny they appear when my eye catches them. But a definite maybe, for parking meters. More than likely, those coins will sit in my cupholder and serve to entice a smash-and-grab while my car is parked.

A penny? Almost no chance. It’s just hard to see the value in individual physical pennies. At the same time I’ll waste hours of my day earning pennies on some stupid app, and for some reason I do feel the value in those. Kind of counterintuitive, since there is no physical evidence of those digital pennies. It begs the oft-asked question: should they just get rid of the penny already?

Do you pick up spare change?

In any case, I ask this question because the U.S. Mint asked for people to turn in their spare change to help with a nationwide coin shortage brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. On the surface, it’s a lighthearted enough story that brought about several cheeky headlines and ledes, but there are real world implications impacting the communities and businesses that bear the brunt of the pandemic in so many ways to begin with.  

The shortage could be especially painful for low-income consumers, who are more likely to pay in cash — potentially exacerbating the impact of the coronavirus crisis, which has already hit low-income communities hard. It may also be a burden to some retailers, for which accepting credit and debit card purchases can come with fees that cash transactions don’t.

That story reminded me of a much more lighthearted article in the Wall Street Journal from a couple years ago, in which the author discusses his years long journey in tracking all of the loose change he finds. Over the course of a 20-year period from 1998-2018, the author had amassed a total of nearly $1,000. Here’s a snippet of his breakdown:

I started keeping track of my finds in a college blue book of the sort used for test essays; today my log resides in a small notebook. In my most lucrative year, 2003, I found $135.65. In my worst, 2013, I found precisely $18. The annual average total is just under $50. The monthly average is $4.05. The daily average is about 13 cents.

That’s not nothing!

But the purpose of the article is not to extoll the virtues of picking up spare change as a retirement strategy, but rather to discuss what has become a hobby to the author, whose spare change pursuits serve as a diary of sorts for various life events, recalling coins found on vacation or at certain stages of his adult life.

In fact, it ultimately has nothing to do with financial savvy, as he readily admits:

Still, I am the first to admit that this isn’t about the money. For one thing, I never spent any of it. And while the change does add up over time, it didn’t take me long to realize it would never really make much of a difference over shorter periods. Besides, it wasn’t as if I was investing the money and watching it grow, which would have been the smart move from a personal-finance standpoint.

As far as hobbies go, you can certainly do worse than to find one that results in an extra 50 bucks a year. But just as he uses his documentation of found money as a barometer for his life trajectory, I tend to do the same thing with my net worth tracking. I take care to note each month on the major purchases or work bonuses or stock market movements, all of which invoke certain memories from those times.

Every little bit of spare change counts

That said, there’s not reason NOT to look at spare change as a side hustle of sorts. Is $4 really a worthwhile return for a “side hustle?” I say, why the hell not? It does add, however little, to that coveted net worth number. And it takes so little effort to bend over and pick up a coin that it’s hard to find a downside. In fact, you might even burn a fourth of a calorie or so in the process, so there are health benefits to picking up spare change!

OK, so maybe you aren’t likely to lose 50 pounds or retire five years earlier because of your spare change collection, but every little bit counts, right? And, unless you get super nerdy with (like the author), you by no means need to track every penny you find; you simply have to pick them up.

While I have effectively nickeled and dimed myself by being a coin snob and only picking up quarters, I still have a jar of coins sitting on my bookshelf that’s about half full (or half empty depending on your world outlook). These aren’t exclusively coins I’ve found, but more likely spare change from cash only bars and vending machines. Clearly I lead a very healthy lifestyle.

The total in that coin jar? $26.52. Hey, not bad!

Is it life changing money? Of course not. But it’s kind of odd to just have 25 bucks sitting on the shelf. If that was paper currency, or a check for that amount, there is no way I would leave it sitting alone on the bookshelf for months and years at a time. And yet, those poor coins sit there, waiting to be spent or invested or swallowed by toddlers.

While an app like Acorns, which takes the spare change from your purchases and automatically invests them for you, shows that spare change, over time, can make a difference, I’m still reluctant to pick up physical change. Even more so in these pandemic times, which have made germophobes of us all.

To answer the question one more time for myself: do I pick up spare change? Not really, but damnit, I’m going to start. I pledge to become a full-fledged penny picker upper from this point forward, in the name of personal finance.

So, do you pick up spare change?