Scraping to get a few extra cents.

As our government gears up to hand out $700,000,000,000 to people who just couldn't seem to live within their means, there are those of us that are doing what we can in order to make every last cent count and finding new and interesting ways to find a couple of extra cents.

Long ago I discovered that I couldn't just raid the couch for change anymore.  Couches just don't seem to attract change like they used to, or it could be that we just don't have many people stopping by to chat, or maybe because most people just don't carry around change anymore.  Either way hidden stores of change and cash are still there but just not as noticeable.

One thing that we started doing is keeping track of the loose change that we end up with.  This little do-dad shouldn't cost you more than about $10 as takes up all the time you'd spend counting all the change in your jar at home and doesn't rob you blind like that coin-counting machine down at the local market.  Also we like this little thingy because it lets us know how much is in that jar at any one time.  So if we are feeling tired and the kids are asking for pizza we can look over at the jar and see that our loose change can give us the night off.  The one drawback to this jar is the fact that you have to put each coin in one at a time and not too quickly, what do you expect for $10?

I like to tinker, but as a father of two young children and not much money to speak of, well, I just can't get around to it.  Because of my desire to tinker over the years I've offered to take junk off the hands of my parents or people I know.  I have a pretty big garage (used to be a small barn) so I've been storing this junk in it.  For the most part this junk that I had acquired had amounted to a couple of washing machines and a dryer.  At first I thought it was going to be great to pull the motor out of those things, make an adapter so that they would run with a car battery and built a little electric car out of the whole mess.  It was sure nice to think about, but as you can all imagine, it didn't really work out that way.

So the other day I said to myself "I'm going to get rid of some of that crap in my garage!"  Usually I would call the DI, they would come and pick this stuff up and from what my wife would tell me (she used to work at the DI) they would bring in appliance repair students to practice on the machines and if they could get them working then the appliances would go to needy families.  Well the DI doesn't do pick up anymore, they would take them if I brought them in.  As my family and I have continued our search for more money we've been taking aluminum cans to a local metal recycling center so I thought that it might be fun to call them and see if we could get any money out of this crap in the back of my garage.  Turns out they pay $.03 a pound for misc metal garbage, and in the end I got about $12.60 for crap taking up space in my garage.  Hurray!