Tuesday, July 8, 2014

Challenge Accepted!

Guess what?  Val (she of the famous Tuesday Archive link-ups) over at  the Val's Quilting Studio blog is hosting her 2nd Annual Piggy Bank Savings Challenge!

 
Val started doing this to put aside money for quilting purchases.  When her DH found out how much she managed to save, he started his own jar and they have been competing ever since to see who can save the most!  
 
At first I thought I might not participate but not because I can't use the extra cash or don't have a jar.  In fact, we (my DH and I) do:
 

It was my DH's idea to start this one years ago when our kids were younger.  The original plan was to use the accumulated cash to put toward vacations.  But we've never filled the jar up!  Now that's partly because I rarely have change -- I do most of my shopping with a debit card and those few times I do use cash, I'm the one on line digging in her purse to give the cashier exact change for the purchase!  Too often DH forgets to empty his pockets at the end of the day, so what's in there is what I dump in from his pockets before his pants go in the laundry or from his nightstand (or the floor in front of his nightstand).  When the kids were younger, we routinely raided the jar for change for school lunches.  Now that the kids are older we often dip in it for carfare when we forget to refill our Metrocards or to keep change in the car for parking meters.

But I spoke to DH and he's willing to take up the challenge with me.  So to start us off, I decided to empty the jar to see just how much we had in there.  I figured it would be less than $20 since I assumed it was mostly Pennies, Nickels and Dimes because most of the raiding we've done over the years has been for the Quarters.  So imagine my surprise when I took the contents to the Coinstar machine and it said this:


Wow and the jar wasn't even a quarter full!  Imagine what we'd have in there if we fill it (and keep the quarters this time)!  So Val, your challenge is accepted!!  I realize that given the narrow neck of our jar, we can't put dollar bills in it (without having to break the jar to get them back out) so we're going to think of someplace else to try to save those. 

Since this will be a shared jar, I don't know right now if all the proceeds will go towards a quilting purchase.  However DH always jokes about wanting to go to Alaska and I've said the only way I'd go is on a quilt cruise.  Hmmm, this could be a way to come up with the deposit and make that happen for both of us!  For now, I'm going to round down what we got and put the $2.16 back in the jar to start us off.  Can't wait to see what we'll have by next year!

Got a lot of loose change hanging around?  Then why not start your own jar and link up with Val and the gang and start saving to make a special quilt dream come true!

3 comments:

Val's Quilting Studio said...

Vivian your post is adorable and I'm so glad you accepted the challenge. I think it is harder to save change with the use of debit cards...but never the less, DD and I just went out to yogurt and paid cash. I quickly snatched up the 52 cents laying on the dashboard afterwards and she just looked at me and laughed! L)

Angela FlowersMoore said...

Congrats you are off to a good start with 2.16. I got in late but interested to see if I hit my goal for a quilt show trip or class or two.

Janet said...

That's a great jar and I bet you'll have tons once it is filled! I have never seen one of those coin counting machines. Interesting.