Indiana Man Buys Pickup Truck With Spare Change
Paul Brant of Indiana bought a 2008 Dodge Ram with quarters and gold dollars worth $26,670. The septuagenarian spent thirteen years collecting enough loose change to buy the new pickup, which will replace the Dodge he purchased in 1994 with 144,000 quarters. Brant's revolutionary method for collecting spare change, after the jump.
Being thrifty, Brant said, comes naturally.The dealership can't convince any bank to accept the water jugs, coffee cans, and piggy banks that hold Brant's spare change, so they hired an armored car to haul and count the coins."I reckon I was just brought up that way," he said.
His father always paid cash, he said, and it's a tradition he carried on.
Besides, he added, "Checks are no fun."
He makes it a habit to save his loose change, he said, explaining that he cleans out his pockets every morning, and doesn't hesitate to pick up stray coins from the ground wherever he goes.
"Once you drop them out of your hand, they're gone," he said. "They don't last very long."
Man Saves Loose Change, Buys New '08 Pickup Truck [The Times]
(Photo: emilybean)
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Mr Thrifty lost out on a bit of interest while keeping his coins at home. He'll stoop to find a penny on the ground but won't put money in the bank
Kind of KOOOOKY.
And now the local nogoodnicks will know where to go to rob the old coot of his change.
We do the same thing except we spend it every year on a vacation. Your spare change is never missed but it sure is appreciated while you're sipping mai tais on the beach.
Canadians have the advantage as our smallest folding money is a five dollar bill. Having a jar full of loonies and toonies (ones and twos) doesn't look like much but it rolls into a lot of money.
After working in a casino for 2 years I never carry cash or coin if I can avoid it. Check cards are so clean. Nobody puts their bodily fluids on your checkcard! :)
Hopefully.
Nice story, but think of how much extra this guy would have gotten if he just deposited that money a few times a year in something, even a low-yield bank savings account. And I thought it was against the law for dealers to accept over $10K cash?
American change usually barely adds up to one USD for a handful of change. Visiting Europe changed my perspective on how valuable, er, Euro change is.
So he saved $171/month.
If he had invested this money on in yearly payments, at only 1% annual interest, he would have made $1,661.
Yearly investments at 5% would have been $9,669 in interest payments.
Insane coin collecting = not very efficient saving method.
@lucky Dogs: Not illegal to accept any amount of tender. It is illegal for them not to fill out a Form stating a cash purchase over 10,000 has been made.
It's not against the law to accept over $10k in cash, there's just some extra paperwork involved. I think it's to avoid money laundering or somesuch.
@TheSeeker: @lucky dogg: @nglatt: Pretty sure the point of this story is that the guy saved $26k in a way that a normal person would have saved $0k. The savings account point is moot. I don't collect spare change, and I have $0 in change for a new truck. Duh.
I saved all my spare change since September and dumped it in all in a coinstar machine last week to buy myself a christmas present on Amazon. I had saved up a whopping $33.42! Since I got it in a gift card, I didn't have to pay the coinstar fee. I did attempt to bring it to my bank, but they refused to count it unless it was sorted and in coin wrappers. The lady even provided me coin wrappers but I decided to go the laziest route and just dump them in a machine that would sort and count them for me. :)
I hope he reported all of that money as income, otherwise the IRS will be having them a new truck.
@Kottles: But it was already his money, just leftovers from his paycheck that he already reported...
@superjanna: wow what a lazy bank. my bank will take whatever container you have filled with coins and cash them in for you for free.
also, i took my spare change to a casino, but then later found out the machines only take bills, the casino counted and cashed them in for me for free.
@Kottles: I'll make sure to keep track of all my loose change and report it as income so the IRS can double tax it. Thanks for the tax tip!
I wonder if the dealership tacked on the armored car fee to his purchase price, or ate it?
Either way, now he gets to use all of his hard earned change buying diesel! Yippee!
@youbastid: I am all for keeping spare change; my point is that a simple trip to the bank only ONCE A YEAR would have yielded him over nearly $125 per trip. A monthly errand would be nearly $750/year, or about $60/trip. You obviously need to collect the change first (difficult for you, apparently), but if you already put in some effort to save, it can pay off way more with only a bit more work. In terms of real dollars, not a mute point.
@nglatt: Definitely still moot. The guy says "checks are boring," and obviously enjoys watching his pile of collected change grow. $125 per trip or $750/year isn't the point. The guy has a HOBBY!
The change thing works...I do it myself. I can't figure out how the heck the guy saved up $26k though. (I might end up with $400 a year if I'm lucky, and I'm pretty diligent about putting all the loose coins in a jar).
Granted, I don't make any interest on that money..but the interest on $400 a year..big whoop.
I keep an old Magnum sized wine bottle sitting in the corner of my living room. Each time I clean the house all loose change goes there. The last time I cleaned it out I had nearly $500 dollars in change in it (it had been more than 3 years since I had emptied it last). My old beat up couch from college was my biggest money maker. It was so beat up that you sat way down into it when you sat down and it would empty everyone's pockets. I would pull hand fulls of change out of that couch.
Of course with the $500 I bought a nice comfortable couch to replace my old "money maker" couch. Sadly the new couch doesn't do as good a job collecting change, although it is much more comfortable.
I also keep a smaller bottle in my bed room where I empty the change out of my pockets every few days. It takes about 18 months to fill the bottle and then I take it to my bank and they count it all out for me. That bottle is my blow some money on a gadget every 18 months bottle.
@nglatt: There is no pile of change if it's in the bank. The point is more about how he saved money just by collecting loose change, something many take for granted.
Don't laugh, but my wife and I paid for our wedding with change saved up from waiting tables. Also bought a new futon, (yes, a futon, I know...) with a stack of $1 coins.
We put our 'spare change' in a high yield savings account. When it hits $1000, we drop it into our investment account. We then earn, on average, about 10% gains per year on the amount. Eventually, our 'spare change' will buy a house.
Husband uses our change bottle to fund his lunches at work. Yes, his friends mock him, but money is money.
I'm still waiting for one of the regulars to say that he should have bought a Prius instead.
@lostalaska: I also keep a magnum sized wine bottle near me at all times. I find it the best way to escape my problems!
@lucky dogg: @qitaana: @persch5: Yep, a Currency Transaction Report. They really aren't fun to fill out (pain in the butt to be honest), but are required for all cash transactions over 10 grand.
@just_paranoid: My credit union also only accepts rolled coin, but they have free coin machines in most of their branches and are working on getting ones in the others. However, I've had a positive experience with the branch I go to..if I bring in a sandwich bag of loose change that's fine, they just don't want waterjug after waterjug of loose change to count through and such.
It is a good question on if the guy had to pay for the armored car or if the dealership ate the cost...I would imagine that if the armored car usually came on that day that they wouldn't charge him. That's a tough call.
I've been pondering opening up an Add-on Share Certificate lately...maybe I'll start putting my spare change in one so that it earns lots of interest ;)
@dwayne_dibbly: He was able to do it because of what he said. He mentioned that he pays cash for everything. If you lived in an entirely cash only world, you'd also accumulate a lot more change then you do now. There are weeks that go by where I never use cash, but I suppose if it was all I used, I'd have tons of change every night to put in a jar.
what a pinhead...he actually rolled all those coins? That's like working for it twice.
I remember reading a story recently about a retired man who had his life savings of $400,000 in cash confiscated by the FBI until the man could prove that he did not gain the money by selling marijuana (I think the Feds have spent...er, still have the money). This guy better be careful or the FBI will be after him too!
I've considered purchasing one of those coin sorters, but they're a little pricey for their quality.
Anyways, I just save my change and bring it to the bank every couple of years. I think the last time I went, I got something like $60 (I do 95% of purchases on CC). Plus, the bank gives me a receipt that shows how many of each denomination I deposited. Pretty cool and they don't charge any transaction fee.
nice photo, it's all canadian change! there's even a toonie in there, near the bottom.
@omerhi: From the article, "Friday, he handed over the coins, neatly rolled and stored in various containers - water jugs, coffee cans, piggy banks - that had ridden in on the bed of his pickup. ...
... "As for how Raisor's cashier planned to handle $26,670 in coins, Gephart said, "No bank wants to take them. We've got a Loomis armored car coming."
No mention of the coins being loose.
I am betting the dealership ate the extra cost of the armored car. They made out like bandits with the "free" publicity.
"The dealership can't convince any bank to accept the water jugs, coffee cans, and piggy banks that hold Brant's spare change"
Isn't it illegal for banks to refuse coins? According to the definition of "legal tender" it is payment that, by law, cannot be refused in settlement of a debt.
@reykjavik: True. I suppose if I paid each and every bill in cash, I would have a lot more coins around. But....I can't imagine how much time and gas I'd burn up driving around just to pay everyone cash on the barrelhead.
That reminds me of a story my Greek friend told me. When the country switched over to the Euro, everyone was overtipping and overspending with the coins, because Greek coins were pretty much worthless and it's really hard to change a long-held perception.
It took 13 years to build up that amount. Of course over the past few years he may have earn a little extra interest. But he sure as heck wasn't earning top interest from day one in 1994.
Some people just have to bag on everything. Here is some guy buying a truck with no worries of payments or being screwed by a dealer since it wanted to get a little free publicity.
Oh wait, this is The Consumerist and this type of good deed is just not right!
@superjanna: What bank are you using? Most banks I found, not credit unions, will count change for free, even if I am not a member. But then I would only bring about 20-30$ in silver change.
$26k over 13 years is $2k per year, or approx $5 to $6 per day saved. By using change rather than handing even dollars to the cashier each time, you should end up with between 0 and $1 in your pocket each day. The amount of money you have shouldn't change, and it's less hassle. How about just putting $5 into a jar every day. Less weight, same idea. Or $5 into a bank account. Again we have less weight, same idea, and interest.
In Japan, where the smallest bill is 1000 yen (about 9 dollars), people always go out of their way to pay with exact change. If something costs 887 yen, and you don't have a 5 yen piece but you have two 1 yen pieces, you will pay might pay 1002 yen so they can get an even 115 yen back. I've gotten into the habit, too. I always pay with cash, but I make every effort to use my coins and avoid getting more coins back as change than necessary. At the end of the day, I rarely have more than a dozen coins on me.
@m_m: I thought about the same thing. On average, you should get 50 cents in coins back for every cash transaction if you always hand over bills. The guy saved about 500 cents a day. This means he did an average of ten cash transactions every day for 13 years.
Hey, can I blame the "victim"? Maybe he was actually siphoning money from vending machines?
@trollkiller: I don't know about you, but most piggy banks I've seen won't let me put rolled coins in them. The way I read the first sentence you quoted was that some were rolled, some were neatly stored in other devices, but not rolled.
@timmus: Reading comprehension would work miracles for you. Keywords: settlement, payment, debt.
And even then, it is unreasonable to make payment in only coins when it is thousands of dollars. 20 bucks, sure. 100, maybe. 26,000? If it was only quarters, thats 10,400,000 coins. Weight alone makes it unreasonable. Paying in 1 dollar bills, (1 USD bill = 1 gram) it would be 26,000 grams or 57.5 pounds. In quarters, (26,000 x 4 x 5.67 grams) = 589,680 grams or 1,300 pounds or .65 tons. Imagine mixed coins, with a nickel almost the same weight as a quarter, and cents/dimes half the weight of a quarter.
//
Below are the official weights of contemporary U.S. coins:
Cent - 2.5 grams
Nickel - 5 grams
Dime - 2.27 grams
Quarter - 5.67 grams
Half Dollar - 11.34 grams
Dollar (SBA) - 8.1 grams
//
@Trick: Not to mention he probably didn't miss the change as it went in the jar, but it kept building up. I'm saving my change to go towards a down payment, either on a car or house, and even though it's only about $20 (Nantucket Nectar bottle, 1/3 full), it'll be a drop in a bucket, but in the end, the contribution's going to make more of a positive impact than throwing the change in the bottle would bother me.
@RandomHookup:
I thought this was all hashed out in all the posts about Apple not taking cash for iPhones - the bank isn't owed anything, so they aren't required to take the cash, there is no debt yet.
@myotheralt:
A Bank of America! In Glendale, CA. And it was just a little sandwich bag full! I was obviously peeved. I had to go out of my way to find a grocery store with a coinstar that would give out the kind of giftcard I wanted.
Ha! That's Canadian money.
You can see the queen, the maple leaves, and toonies.
Some banks go out of their way to make it costly or not worth your bother to bring them your change, rolled or not. I had one bank that had a coin machine and wouldn't charge you if you put all of the money into your account. Then they started to charge you no matter what you did. Finally they required you to roll it and then the money wouldn't show up in your account for 5 days.
This is nice and all, but how did he pay for the back pain treatments?