Retirement Becomes Poor Fund

A little over 10 years ago I bought a large plastic bud light bottle full of popcorn while I was working at K-Mart. Those were the good old days when I was making around $7 an hour which was just about the same hourly wage I was getting if you averaged out my salary and number of hours worked in the eight years since college.

Any who ... after I ate the stale popcorn I had a decision to make. Throw the large plastic bottle away or keep it for decoration. Like most college kids any form of alcohol decor is a good thing so I put it on top of my entertainment center. This bottle as it turned out had a slit in the cap like it was a piggy bank for drunks so I started using it as such. Thankfully back then there was such a thing as 25 cent beer night at Washington's Bar and Grill in Fort Collins so for every beer I drank I usually came home with 50 cents in change (I was a big tipper back then). That usually added up to around $5 so my drunken piggy started adding up fast.

My bar change gave me a great idea. I never use change to pay for anything and hate it lying around so whenever I got change I would just throw it in the bottle. I decided that I would let the bottle fill up and then cash it out and put it into my savings as a sort of retirement fund built strictly off change. I was always taught growing up to save money.

That brings me to today. My plans haven't exactly worked out the way I envisioned them 10 years ago. I have stuck with my bottle all this time, putting change in whenever I acquired it. The problem I face now is I have been self-imposed unemployed for eight months and my savings is starting to run dry. Apparently bill collectors don't understand that when you aren't making any money you shouldn't have to pay off your car payments or your cell phone bills. Thus I decided to prematurely cash in my drunken piggy before it was all the way filled in order to have a little extra money for my bills.

When I was in elementary school I remember my teacher used to bring in a jar full of jelly beans and the student in the class that guessed closest to the number of jelly beans in the jar would win a cool prize. I thought I would do the same so I polled a few family members close by and offered up a free Frosty from Wendy's to the person who came closest to the change in the bottle. I started the guessing with an estimate (or hope really) that there was $250. My family members were even more optimistic than me as I was the low end of the spectrum. Here are the guesses.

Ben - $250
My dad - $270
My grandma - $300
My sister - $340
My mom - $400
My stepmom - $423

The next step to my process was to carry it over to my mom's house where I was going to roll the change. Luckily she is a bank teller and has access to plenty of the little coin papers. I noticed that over the years this bottle has gotten a lot heavier than it was when it contained some old popcorn. So when I hauled it over I threw it on the bathroom scale to see how much it weighed. The result was 46 pounds. I may have needed to start taking PED's to move it if I let it fill all the way to the top.

I thought there was a lot of change in the bottle but once I dumped it out on the card table it looked like a lot more. I put a $20 bill on the table to show the size of the pile. Yes I did have a 20 spot even though I am broke but only because I have saved it from the $90 I made working part time in the month of June. That is a monthly salary comparable to the stories of wages when my grandparents were my age. Only then it would buy a couple of oxen,  a wagon tongue, some salt beef and ammunition to hunt buffalo on the Oregon Trail.

Well luckily I was wrapping these coins in the afternoon so I had a chance to watch Around the Horn and PTI on ESPN (which ironically are the same topics that are included in hot clicks each day on SI.com) and Seinfeld on TBS. This helped the coin wrapping go a lot faster as it would take me about four hours to sort while my mom would wrap the coins. In the end I was very ecstatic with the results.

Here is what I ended up with ...

55 rolls and 11 loose pennies for $27.61
13 rolls of nickles for $26.00
18 rolls of dimes for $90.00
32 rolls and five loose quarters for $321.25
4 50 cent pieces
2 gold dollar coins

For a grand total of ........ $468.86

It looks like I will be able to make my car payments for two more months now. And luckily I have since acquired approximately 99 cents in my bottle so I can make good on the Frosty I owe my step mom. My retirement fund will have to start over again once someone finally hires me.