Save Your Change For 250 Days, Here's Why

Drew Thomas  0:30  
So, we've got some, this, this is pretty cool. We reached out to a local celebrity, and I think that's a legitimate, a legitimate description of him at this point with, with Moneyman. So, for those of you that don't live around the Johnstown area, around Pennsylvania, where there's a local celebrity that is, he goes by the name Moneyman, and he is...

Jeff Matevish  1:02  
Mystery, otherwise, we don't know who, nobody knows who he is.

Drew Thomas  1:05  
Yeah, nobody, I mean, legitimately, everything he does is, he's got like the motorcycle helmet on, and everything, like nobody knows who this person is, really. But he does all sorts of stuff around the community, and he gives back a lot. He does, you know, some, some really cool little, you know, pop-up contests and scavenger hunts and things like that, and we've partnered with him over the years as well, through the, through the bank, not, not necessarily Bank Chats as the podcast, but through our, through our parent company, we have partnered with him to do some, some pretty cool stuff in the community over the last few years, and so we asked him if he would be so kind as to throw some ideas out there, or to request ideas for podcast topics from, from his audience, because he has one.

Jeff Matevish  1:57  
And we can come up with things ourselves, but it may not be things that people want to be listening to or watching or anything, so.

Drew Thomas  2:02  
Yeah, so you know, we've, we've, and we have asked and gotten a couple of, you know, comments and feedback, and over the years on the podcast itself.

Jeff Matevish  2:16  
Tends to be AmeriServ employees saying, hey, good job.

Drew Thomas  2:19  
Yeah, which, which is, which is great, but not super helpful in terms of coming up with topics, right? And can you believe we're almost, we're what, four years in doing this podcast?

Jeff Matevish  2:31  
Four years? Three years.

Drew Thomas  2:32  
Well, we're on three, we're on three, I think we passed just past our third-year anniversary, right? No, no, no, no, that's in August, coming up. Yeah, so we're...

Jeff Matevish  2:40  
But it's still a long time.

Drew Thomas  2:41  
Yeah, I mean, we've, we've done over 60 episodes now of the podcast, which, quite honestly, is more than some podcasts make it to, yeah, yeah, and far less than others. But yeah, we've, we've done quite a few of these, and it's not that we, it's not that we're necessarily running out of ideas, but we want to know what people want to hear. So, anyway, he was, he was really kind and put out some stuff, and man, he got all kinds of different pieces of feedback. And to be fair, a lot of them we have touched on already, but there were definitely some new ones in there, I think, too, that we get, be able to get to, right?

Jeff Matevish  3:22  
We're weeding through it right now, yeah, and coming up with a list of future topics that we can cover.

Drew Thomas  3:28  
Right. Yeah, but one of them stood out to us, and you know, as you can tell by my unintentional patriotic background here, that I've got going on. For those of you that are, that are listening, I happen to be wearing a red polo today, and I've got the blue backlighting here, so if you're watching on YouTube, and Jeff, Jeff's actually wearing blue too, so he's got the, we should have made your backlighting red, and then it would have been...

Jeff Matevish  3:52  
Total opposite, yeah.

Drew Thomas  3:54  
I don't want to play with the white balance, but anyway, so with the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the, of the country happening here in July, because that's when this is dropping, is in July, shortly after our nation's birthday, we decided to pull one of the comments that was in his request, and it's from an Amber, do we want to say last, well she has her last name out there, right? So, so Amber Potts asked the question in honor of Fourth of July and 250 years, what can you save in 250 days if you put loose change in a jug? That was kind of interesting.

Jeff Matevish  4:42  
Yeah. And that's a little, you know, it depends how much change you get in a day.

Drew Thomas  4:49  
It depends a lot. As we, as we found, while we were researching this.

Jeff Matevish  4:53  
We went down a rabbit hole. Yeah, both of us, Drew went down a rabbit hole.

Drew Thomas  4:56  
I mean, both of, both of us did. But Amber, I'm going to tell you something. We have devoted some time to this, which, which is fine. That's, that's the whole point. So, let's, we're going to talk through how we each approached the problem, you know, Jeff and I, and then try to give you some sort of an answer to your question, although to Jeff's point, it is, it is a bit subjective, because you don't know how many transactions you're making every day. You don't know how, what the value of those transactions are every day. So, what Amber may save in 250 days is completely different than what you or I or anybody else, for that matter, might save in the same amount of time. Right, right, right. So, what did you, so what did you start putting together? What did you, how did you approach this?

Jeff Matevish  5:42  
So, I asked the internet, what is a realistic amount of money, amount of change that you can save in 250 days? It was very general, it was not as specific as questions you were, you know, looking into.

Drew Thomas  5:57  
Well, to be fair, those that watch and listen on a regular basis, know that I am like super granular when it comes to something, but yeah, so.

Jeff Matevish  6:04  
Simply, what's a realistic number, amount of change that you can save in 250 days. And it depends on if you are a cash person or a plastic person, first off, but if you are a cash person, pocket change wise, roughly $75 to $200 which is, that's a pretty big span, number, which comes out to 38 to 80 cents per day. The second category was saving all coins, so that first one was assuming that if you had three or four transactions in a day, you were using whatever change you could out of your pocket, you know, to for the next transaction, gotcha, so you would, theoretically would have less change at the end of the day. The second one is saving all coins from, from cash, cash purchases, which it said between $200 to $500 in those 250 days. So, that's 80 cents to $2 per day, and that could be higher or lower than in the last year or two, because the penny is no longer a thing, so we can go down that rabbit hole sometime, but yeah, or deliberately adding loose change each day, you know, it's however much change you want to put in that, you know, the internet said $500 to $1,000+, so setting aside an average of $2 to $4 per day in coins, you know it adds up really quickly.

Drew Thomas  7:27  
Okay, yeah, I mean, it definitely would. So, to your point, though, and we're going to get into this on the because the way that I did the calculation was definitely different. Yes, yours is better. Let's, let's say it that way.

Jeff Matevish  7:45  
Broader is better in this case.

Drew Thomas  7:46  
Broader is better. So, it really does come down. I mean, whenever I first heard the question, my first gut instinct was just to say, well, if you save $1 a day, it's $250, right? True. So, that was, you know, that, and say 99 cents in your pocket every day, right? Yeah, so you know, 250 bucks, but I thought, no, I'm going to actually start to like, I wanted to really kind of think through this, so I thought, okay, well, here are some of the assumptions that I made, and Jeff, I don't know, you may end up putting some of this up on the screen, or something like you've done before. I don't know, so, but what I said was, I said, okay. Current, I looked up what the current estimates are. So, current estimates place cash transactions in the United States at about 18% of all transactions.

Jeff Matevish  8:38  
Okay.

Drew Thomas  8:39  
Which is actually probably a little higher than I thought it would be.

Jeff Matevish  8:41  
Yeah. Most is card now, yeah.

Drew Thomas  8:43  
Yeah. But I guess that does mean that 72% is card, so.

Jeff Matevish  8:47  
Yeah.

Drew Thomas  8:48  
You can look at it that way.

Jeff Matevish  8:49  
So, I'm one of the 18%

Drew Thomas  8:51  
Yeah. Well, you know, hey, I cheerfully accept cash, you know. So, 18% of transactions a day, and then so I was like, well, how many transactions does the average person make every day, and the answer came back like one to two, so one and a half to two. Sure, so that means that you're making a cash transaction in today's world on average about once every three days.

Jeff Matevish  9:17  
Okay.

Drew Thomas  9:18  
Okay, is how the numbers come out, and the value of those transactions, and again, this is according to the almighty internet, is about $23. Okay. Okay. So, so if your, if your average transaction value is $23 and you're making about one every three days, so that means you're making, you know, about 83 transactions in the 250-day window, right? That Amber was asking about, so but then I thought to myself, self, not every transaction is the same or, there's, there's sales tax and things like that, so how much change am I likely to get? Because if it's $23 that's an even number, I can't get changed from an even number. So, I had to figure out what, what the value would be, and how much change I was likely to get from each transaction.

Jeff Matevish  10:06  
Yeah, right, 99 cents or less. Yes.

Drew Thomas  10:16  
Right, right. So, so what I did was I said, okay, well, what's the average sales tax across the country, because every state is different, and some cities actually have sales tax on, on, on purchases and stuff too. We've talked about that before. So, sales breath away, it does these numbers. So, sales tax across the country on average is about 7.53%. Okay. Okay, so in order for the final price to land between that $23 to $24 window per transaction, the original price would have to be between $21 and $22 so or $22.30, so since most things in the US are priced at 99 cents, I went with $21.99. Okay. Okay. So, a value of $21.99 for whatever you're buying, plus tax. I am a mess today, honest to goodness. So, $21.99 plus tax means that your, your calculation would come out to being about $23.68 per transaction.

Jeff Matevish  11:24  
Okay.

Drew Thomas  11:25  
Right. And to get change back from that, you'd get about 32 cents back, okay. All right, so going back to what I said before, you're making about 83 of these transactions in a 250-day window, that means that you get about $26.56 in loose change in 250 days.

Jeff Matevish  11:44  
That's a lot less than what I had.

Drew Thomas  11:46  
It is a lot, that's why I said yours is going to be better.

Jeff Matevish  11:48  
Well, but if even if you round it up a little bit to like the 50 cents for the 250 yes, you know that would a little bit, yeah.

Drew Thomas  11:57  
It would add a little bit, I mean, you'd be adding an extra what, 18 cents per transaction times 83 so 40 bucks, 40-45 bucks, but the problem is that...

Jeff Matevish  12:07  
Mine's probably taking like the average, average, like, as like 50 cents.

Drew Thomas  12:11  
Well, and yours is per day, mine is actually every three days. Yeah, because I was trying to figure out how many you'd actually be doing and all that stuff, but to your point, it really does depend on how much of a cash person you are. If you, if you pay with most of your stuff in cash, you're going to be closer to Jeff's number, and if you pay with most of your stuff on average, as Americans do with debit cards and credit cards and things like that, gift cards, yeah, oh yeah, you know, then you're, you're likely to get less because you're just making fewer cash transactions. Right?  Right, now, I did go, I did go one step further, and I thought, okay, you know, because when I was, you and I kind of talked about this when we first started discussing the topic, like when I was, when I was younger, I had a big plastic jug in the shape of a particular brand of my favorite, or one of my favorite alcoholic beverages that would sit in my room, right?

Jeff Matevish  13:04  
I have a five gallon one, so yeah, water, $5 or five gallon water, of course.

Drew Thomas  13:13  
So, I would fill that up whenever I was younger, and every time I'd come home, I would, I would throw my loose change into it, and I would collect a couple $100 a year. Oh, easy in that thing. Yeah, and while I still have this thing sitting in my house, I rarely add to it. I can't remember the last time I took it to the bank and had the coins counted to get the money out of it. I probably should, just because it's been sitting there for years. Yeah, so I thought, okay, let's go back. So, I went to about 1990. Okay, I went back about 35 years.

Jeff Matevish  13:44  
Okay.

Drew Thomas  13:46  
The average cash transaction totals back then were way higher, probably closer to what you do, definitely. Yeah, so instead of...

Jeff Matevish  13:59  
18%

Drew Thomas  14:00  
Instead of 18% they were about 80%.

Jeff Matevish  14:02  
Wow.

Drew Thomas  14:03  
Of all cash, of all transactions were cash back then.

Jeff Matevish  14:05  
Okay.

Drew Thomas  14:06  
And people were making more frequent transactions, right? Because I don't know, I guess because more affordable.

Jeff Matevish  14:13  
You don't think as much about purchasing, you know? I don't know, I, you know, if I spend, you know, I work on a budget too, so if I spend a lot of money in the first part of the week, I kind of, you know, the second half of the week I'll kind of relax on my spending, or not relax, but get more strict on what I'm buying, and stuff like that.

Drew Thomas  14:33  
Yeah, I totally get that.

Jeff Matevish  14:35  
I guess you didn't do that as much in the 90s.

Drew Thomas  14:37  
Well, I mean, I think that I don't know.

Jeff Matevish  14:40  
Things were cheaper.

Drew Thomas  14:41  
Well, things were cheaper, I mean, for sure. But I think also part of it is the fact that today you can buy so much in bulk, so you know you can buy stuff online, you can buy stuff on at Sam's Club, you can, whatever. So, you're making one purchase, one transaction, and you're buying more. Stuff, yeah, in that transaction than you were, whenever in the 90s, when you had to go from store, to store, to store.

Jeff Matevish  15:07  
That's true, that's probably a big reason to buy all this stuff, yeah, now you can go to Walmart and buy your, you know, steaks for the night, and a new outfit, and you know, pet food, and winter tires, baby formula, and a one stop shop. Yeah, okay, that makes sense then, yeah.

Drew Thomas  15:23  
So, that's my knee-jerk reaction to this, but so, okay, so again, we'll go, we'll go through the numbers here. So, I said sales tax also was a bit lower back then, approximately it was about 6% across all states.

Jeff Matevish  15:38  
Yeah.

Drew Thomas  15:38  
So, the average amount of each transaction around 1990 was between $12 and $13 and you'd be making about 10 per week, though, as opposed to one every three days.

Jeff Matevish  15:51  
Yeah, that's, that's significantly higher.

Drew Thomas  15:53  
So, you're making like, cash transaction like twice a day, really, maybe, maybe a little, maybe a little less than twice a day, so, so, about 10 per week. So, for the final price to land between $12 and $13, I used $11.99 for the item value to then add tax to it, which gave me in a total of $12.71. $11.99 plus tax is $12.71 so you're getting 29 cents back per transaction.

Jeff Matevish  16:22  
So, even less than what your estimate was now.

Drew Thomas  16:25  
Three, three cents less than my estimate for today, right? But you're making about 10 of these per week, so that means you're making about 360 transactions within the 250-day period, instead of 83.

Jeff Matevish  16:38  
Wow.

Drew Thomas  16:40  
360 multiplied by 29 cents, $104.40.

Jeff Matevish  16:44  
Wow.

Drew Thomas  16:45  
So, you're making $104.40.

Jeff Matevish  16:45  
Versus $26.

Drew Thomas  16:48  
Versus $26 bucks, right? And then just for a little bit of gravy, I actually adjusted for inflation, so, so $104.40 in 1990 would be worth $266 and one penny today. Wow. So, $266 because the penny doesn't exist. So, yeah, so I mean a lot more and much closer to your value, even from today, right?

Jeff Matevish  17:15  
I mean, yeah, because, yeah, for so, if saving all coins was $200 to $500, saving just your change, for you know, at the end of the day, was $75 to $200. So, I mean, it's in between.

Drew Thomas  17:28  
So, there you go. So, I guess the real answer here is, it depends on how much you spend in cash. Yeah, yeah, you know, and how disciplined you are about saving those coins.

Jeff Matevish  17:38  
Now, if you're not a cash person, how can you replicate this with plastic?

Drew Thomas  17:44  
So, that's a good question. You got to, that's a good question, because you're right. I mean, there are ways to sort of save your change. I know, yeah, I know there are some. There are some credit cards that will automatically round you up to the nearest dollar. Sometimes it's, it's for things like it'll donate it to charity, things like that. I know some stores and restaurants will do that too. They have the charitable organizations that they work with. Yeah, and they'll ask you if you want to round up to the nearest dollar to donate to that charity. Yeah, right. Doesn't help you, but it may help somebody less fortunate than you.

Jeff Matevish  18:16  
Sure, yeah.

Drew Thomas  18:18  
You had a good idea, though. You said that you know, going into your using online banking to do it right?

Jeff Matevish  18:22  
Yeah, it's a pretty manual process, but yeah, whatever change you would, you know, get back theoretically rounded up and then take it from your checking account and do a transfer over to savings, yeah, yeah.

Drew Thomas  18:25  
And you could even just do that once a day, if you even if you didn't do it per transaction.

Jeff Matevish  18:38  
Right, right, just set up an automatic, you know, $1 a day, you know, feed from your checking to savings account, it adds up.

Drew Thomas  18:45  
Yeah, yeah, I mean, you figure $1 a day is 365 days, dollars a year, yeah, right, so you know that's, that's really, that is one of those things that I think people tend to forget about, is that, you know, like, and you know, how can I say, certain organizations that may or may not use Tina Yothers or Sally Struthers as a, as a marketing person. Yeah, I'm showing my age a little bit here. Okay. Who would say, you know, for, for, for 25 cents, for less than a cup of coffee a day, yes, right, yes, you can help, yes, yes, but you can do that for yourself too, you know, if you, if you pay yourself less than a cup of coffee a day, right.

Jeff Matevish  19:32  
I was just going to say, you know what I mean, coffee is a great example, don't get a cup of coffee one day a week and you'll save $5 a week, you know.

Drew Thomas  19:39  
If you're going to certain stores, you're saving $5 a day. Yeah.

Jeff Matevish  19:44  
That's what I said once a week, you're saving $5 a week, you know.

Drew Thomas  19:48  
Yeah, if you didn't get it one day a week, I got you, right? Right. Yeah, yeah. I mean, going out to lunch, you know, is another thing, like if you, if you tend to work in an office or somewhere where you're not at home. And you, and you go out to lunch, and you don't think of it in the moment, you think oh it's six bucks, it's seven bucks, a lot of times now you go to fast food joints, it's, it's more than that, but let's say you spend $5 a day on lunch and you work five days a week, it's, it's 100 bucks a month.

Jeff Matevish  20:17  
Yeah, yeah, I mean, I try to pack my lunch every day, and yeah, I think I, what did I do this week? And I make the same food for the week, you know. Sunday, that's one of my routines, is Sunday is laundry and lunches for the week. Okay, so I'll make, you know, the same thing for lunch all week, and then by Friday I'm really tired of it. Yeah, so it drastically changes for the next, next week, but I probably have $10-$11 into lunches this week. Yeah, you know, which isn't a lot, you know that you could spend that in one day, like you said. You know, going out to eat.

Drew Thomas  20:48  
Oh, easily. Easily.

Jeff Matevish  20:49  
Coupons is another good way to save money and to put your extra money away. So, whatever money you would spend, if you had a coupon, whatever money you saved with that coupon, move that from your check into your savings account.

Drew Thomas  21:03  
Okay, now you brought up something about coupons, though.

Jeff Matevish  21:07  
That can be dangerous. And my wife and I are...

Drew Thomas  21:10  
I think it's worth talking about.

Jeff Matevish  21:12  
My wife and I are both guilty of this. Just because there's a coupon doesn't mean you need it, right? One of our local grocery stores around this time of year has a 4th of July sale, or yeah, you know that kind of stuff, but it used to be $1 sale, and now you know in the economy we live in, it's and because it's the 250th you know, it's a $2.50 sale.

Drew Thomas  21:38  
It's a reason to inflate that number to two, $2.50 instead of, yeah, right.

Jeff Matevish  21:43  
But so we'll go out and we'll buy, you know, excess amounts of this food that we don't normally buy. We're not Uncrustable people, but whenever it's $2.50.

Drew Thomas  21:52  
How are you not? Look, Uncrustables are good, I'm just, they just...

Jeff Matevish  21:56  
They are, but you don't, you don't need to buy 18 boxes of them and shove them into your freezer for a year, and then they go bad.

Drew Thomas  22:03  
Well, that's true. Yeah, I agree. I have this, I have this argument with, not argument, I have this discussion with my wife. She loves Uncrustables, absolutely loves them. Okay, and, and there's nothing wrong with them. I think they're, I think they're fantastic, they're little packets of joy, but if you really look at it, you think to yourself, like, I could buy a jar of peanut butter, a jar of jelly, and some bread, and I can make 50, you know, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for probably the cost of one box of 10 Uncrustables, you know what I mean, I mean, you're paying for the convenience, yeah, you know.

Jeff Matevish  22:37  
The time that goes into making it, yeah.

Drew Thomas  22:41  
But yeah, it's just, you know, but you're absolutely right. There's a lot of people that buy stuff because it's on sale, and it's like, well, it's only a deal if you needed it in the first place. If you, if you're only buying it because it's cheaper, but you wouldn't have bought it anyway, it's still costing you money, right?

Jeff Matevish  22:55  
And this particular store just started putting it at the very bottom of these coupons save up to blah blah blah blah blah per transaction or per item, or you know, so it makes it so even if it was something you didn't want to buy or you normally wouldn't buy, it's like, but I could save, you know, $3 on, this right? So, I have to get it, yeah.

Drew Thomas  23:17  
Oh, trust me, they know exactly what they're doing. Yes, yeah, we should probably have a discussion about the, and this may be an episode that we could do, maybe do a sort of, an on location type thing, not really, not really necessarily show what stores were in, but I think it's, I think there's something really to be said for an episode about how to identify whether or not you're getting a deal.

Jeff Matevish  23:42  
Yeah.

Drew Thomas  23:43  
Because like the per, the per item price and things like that all the time, got to look at that stuff.

Jeff Matevish  23:50  
Yeah, yeah.

Drew Thomas  23:51  
So, I won't go into detail on that because I think there's an episode there is, yeah, but, but anyway, getting back to Amber's question, yeah, I really think that, that there is, there's definitely value in saving your change. To your, to your point, there are apps out there that will help you save change.

Jeff Matevish  24:13  
Okay.

Drew Thomas  24:14  
There are apps that will do essentially what these restaurants do, and things where they round up for their charity. There are apps out there that you can connect to your bank account, so that when you make a transaction on your debit card, whatever the difference in the price is between your purchase and the next highest dollar, it'll round up, and then it'll automatically take that change and either deposit it into a savings account for you, or some of them will even do investments, like micro investments, yeah. Where it'll help to, to you know, do hopefully investing, whatever, in the stock market, or whatever. Again, investments are not guaranteed to return value, so I don't necessarily, you know, endorse that idea, but statistically speaking, across the entire stock market over a 10-year period, you're likely to make money. So.

Jeff Matevish  25:05  
Good disclaimer.

Drew Thomas  25:06  
Put it that way. Yeah, but, but to your point, there are ways to do this electronically, yeah, that don't necessarily involve a jar and a jug, and whatever. I would definitely recommend, though. You know, grabbing that jug of change if you have it, and, and taking it to your, a lot of banks will have coin machines. We have some coin machines that are branches that can dump it into, and then it'll count it for you. Yeah, take it over to the to the teller line, or whatever, and they'll give you the cash for it.

Jeff Matevish  25:37  
You can do a Coin Star type thing, though they take a cut, or whatever.

Drew Thomas  25:40  
They do take a cut, but if you don't want to sit there and hand roll coin.

Jeff Matevish  25:44  
Yeah, yeah.

Drew Thomas  25:45  
You know it's, it's possibly worth it to you to let them take a cut of it. The other side of it too is when you talk about these things, are you mixing your coins or are you saving only certain ones, because you can have one of those five-gallon water jugs that you get for like the water cooler at work full of pennies.

Jeff Matevish  26:08  
Yeah.

Drew Thomas  26:08  
And it's not going to be anywhere near as valuable as a coffee can full of quarters.

Jeff Matevish  26:13  
Yeah, right, or.

Drew Thomas  26:14  
Dimes, absolutely, so that also becomes one of those things, you know, I saved all my, like, I would just take whatever was in my pocket and I would just throw it into that jug. Yeah, so my jug was commingled with everything that I had, and occasionally, once in a while, you'd, you'd stumble across like a $1 Sacajawea coin or something like that, and you were like, so we know.

Jeff Matevish  26:34  
But did you go through and look for like silver or special coins, or like that's a good point, flawed coins or anything like that. It's my family was into that kind of stuff. Yeah, we'd look for silver, we'd look for wheat pennies, we'd look for anything that was known to be like, I don't know, like a double die or, you know, a die flaw of some sort. Yeah, would make that coin worth a little bit more money. We didn't do anything with it, sitting in a different jar. Yes.

Drew Thomas  27:08  
I did look for silver, because it was easy. You can hear it, yeah.

Jeff Matevish  27:13  
If you got a good eye, you could see it real quick.

Drew Thomas  27:15  
Well, yeah, but I mean, but a lot of times you could, if you were, if you took your coins out of your pocket and you and you just kind of like toss them to yourself, like all of a sudden it was like no, no, I hear a silver coin in there, and if you, if you find anything, if you, if you, if you have any silver coins, or you have grandparents or parents, or whatever, that have like a coin collection, like grab, just grab one silver quarter and mix it in with a handful of other coin, and then toss it, use, and then take that, and listen, you can hear it.

Jeff Matevish  27:44  
Oh, yeah. Well, that's why old cash registers used to have marble, a little marble plate at the front of the cash register.

Drew Thomas  27:50  
Oh yeah.

Jeff Matevish  27:50  
Because they would, if they thought it was a counterfeit coin, or whatever, they would drop the coin on that, and it would make a certain sound, and they would know that sound.

Drew Thomas  27:57  
Yeah.

Jeff Matevish  27:57  
And that was a way that they could tell a counterfeit or not. Not that I'm saying that you're collecting counterfeit money, I'm just saying that you know every, every, every metal makes a different sound.

Drew Thomas  28:07  
It does, yeah, no, yeah. So, yeah, and to your point, you're absolutely right. If you looked at the edge, you could very quickly tell whether or not it was a sandwich coin, which I think every coin today, now we have, unless you're specifically buying like a double eagle or something like that, it's made up of not just silver, but quarters, pretty much anything from 1964 back, I think, were silver. So, if you have any quarters that are 64 or older, you know they're going to be silver. They're again, they're not necessarily worth much more than 25 cents, if you took it to a jeweler and had it weighed, you might get 50 cents for that quarter, or something like that. In today's, I don't know, it didn't know what silver is going for right now, but so I would look for that stuff, but I was never, my dad did collect coins for a while, and he has some neat, neat stuff. Yeah, but to go through all those different ones, for the, it was almost like playing the lottery, like the likelihood of finding...

Jeff Matevish  29:11  
Oh, it took forever, but it's a hobby.

Drew Thomas  29:12  
Yeah, if you enjoy that, that's absolutely worth doing. Yeah, you know that we, there was a thing for a while there where they were doing all the state, like when they originally changed to all the state quarters, where everybody collected all 50, and before that it was mostly just like the, the eagle on the back of the quarters, which I now it's actually pretty rare to come across one that has an eagle on.

Jeff Matevish  29:35  
Yeah, so people are collecting those now, yeah, because it's not as common, yeah.

Drew Thomas  29:42  
I have a couple of this has nothing to do with collecting change, but I have a couple of, like, like coin, the untouched ones you can get from, like, the mint, like, I think my dad bought my sister and I each one for our birth years, so I have proof sets.

Jeff Matevish  29:57  
Yeah.

Drew Thomas  29:58  
I have one from 1970. And my sister has one from 1980 so, but yeah, those are those are, but that's not coming out of change, and I mean, occasionally you do hear that story that somebody that finds a some rare coin in their change or something like that, I mean, it does happen, but you have to be, to your point, pretty disciplined about going through it all. Yeah.

Jeff Matevish  30:24  
You have to know what you're looking for. Yeah. Yeah. And there's so many variations of known defects on coins. I mean, you have to be an expert to be able to hit all of them. Yeah.

Drew Thomas  30:36  
You know, statistically, there's probably a pretty good chance that, that all of us have probably had not a million-dollar coin, but at least something of higher value come through our hands over the years. Sure, you simply just don't know what you're holding. Yeah, you know, or you just didn't pay attention to look at each one to see if there was a mint mark or not, or if it was a D or a P, or whatever. So, all that stuff, but yeah, I think this was an interesting question. What else you got?

Jeff Matevish  31:07  
I had one more, one more thing that I asked the internet of what you can buy with $250.

Drew Thomas  31:12  
Oh, that's a neat idea.

Jeff Matevish  31:13  
And the response that I got back was...

Drew Thomas  31:17  
Anything worth $250?

Jeff Matevish  31:19  
Well, okay, so you know, if you ask someone on the street, what can you do with $250 most likely they're going to say, well, not as, not a lot, not as much as you used to, but if you really try hard, you can do a lot with $250. So, you can go on vacation for $250. You can buy a two to four person tent and go to a campground for the, for the weekend, and go camping, okay. New car, you can get a detailing kit and make your car look new again, or...

Drew Thomas  31:48  
That's not a new car.

Jeff Matevish  31:49  
Okay, so I said it's a stretch. Yes, or you can...

Drew Thomas  31:53  
That's a new to you car.

Jeff Matevish  31:54  
You can rent a car for the weekend, possibly for $250 depending on where you rent and what kind of car you're getting. So new to you. Entertainment, though we've had conversations about streaming services, $250 goes a long way when it comes to streaming services.

Drew Thomas  32:11  
True, you can get almost two months' worth of streaming services.

Jeff Matevish  32:15  
Well, it depends on what you know, ads versus not ads now, right? Big difference in price. There is a new wardrobe, you know. I'm not talking about buying Gucci, but you're going to go to a big box store, you can get some decent clothes. That's true. Have a new look for the new school year, maybe, or whatever. A new house. Buy paint and paint supplies, and you know, do a refresh on a room or two of your house, okay? Okay, right? Or the start of an emergency fund, or put it towards a house down payment. Yeah, there's a lot you can do with $250 if you really try.

Drew Thomas  32:51  
Those are, those are very good points, and honestly, doing almost anything with that $250 is that's productive like that is better than necessarily spending it on extra Uncrustables.

Jeff Matevish  33:06  
Very good point.

Drew Thomas  33:07  
Yes, about I'm dropping the mic. That's it.

Jeff Matevish  33:16  
This podcast focuses on having valuable conversations on various topics related to banking and financial health, the podcast is grounded in having open conversations with professionals and experts, with the goal of helping to take some of the mystery out of financial and related topics. As learning about financial products and services can help you make more informed financial decisions, please keep in mind that the information contained within this podcast and any resources available for download from our website or other resources relating to Bank Chats is not intended and should not be understood or interpreted to be financial advice. The hosts, guests, and production staff of Bank Chats expressly recommend that you seek advice from a trusted financial professional before making financial decisions. The hosts of Bank Chats are not attorneys, accountants, or financial advisors, and the program is simply intended as one source of information. The podcast is not a substitute for a financial professional who is aware of the facts and circumstances of your individual situation. Thank you for listening. Please check out our full library of episodes, which can be found on the ameriserv.com website. You can also download or stream the podcast from your favorite podcast app.