Coinstar: Cash in Your Change

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coinstar machine

Our boys love collecting change. In fact they almost always take our change and place it in their coin banks. We don’t mind because the rule is the change is used when we go on vacation. We will turn the change into cash and do something special when we go on our trip.

Most of the time we roll our own change. Hubby recently had the boys sort some change and roll the quarters. This was a learning activity for the boys teaching them what each coin was worth. The process took hubby and the kids about 2 hours. They had no energy to roll the pennies or remaining change.

change bucket

I was asked to check out the Coinstar cash in process and thought this was the perfect time since we leave for vacation the day after Christmas. I gathered the change from all buckets throughout the house. It was easy to locate a Coinstar location by entering a zipcode on their website.

Coinstar allows you to change the coins into cash or into a gift card or eCertificate. I chose cash since we will need it on our trip. There is a service fee for choosing the cash option- 9.8 cents per dollar. If you choose gift card or eCertificate there is not a service fee.

coinstar total

It was very simple to use the Coinstar machine. It kept track of the number of coins I put in as they dropped into the machine. In the end I had 1751 pennies! Good thing we didn’t take the time to roll those! I ended up with $48.01 in change that when through the Coinstar machine. The service fee was $4.70 which left me with $43.31 on a voucher I took to the cashier.

cash from coinstar

Now that I think about it, $4.70 isn’t a bad deal since it took only 5 minutes for this process. If you figure time is money, it would have cost me a lot of time to roll all of the small change.

I will use Coinstar again and next time I am going to try out the gift card option! They even have Kroger and CVS gift cards- two of my favorite stores!

You can checkout my whole Coinstar experience in my Google+ story.

Have you used Coinstar before?

Disclosure: This shop has been compensated as part of a social shopper insights study for Collective Bias.

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Renae is a married working mom of two handsome boys. She works as a registered dental hygienist by day and blogs here at How to Have it All by night. She enjoys cooking from scratch, working in her vegetable garden and functional training.

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Comments

  1. I have never used Coinstar but love knowing about your experience! Thanks for sharing! IF I ever let my husband’s change add up, I can try this option! Definately will get the giftcards for groceries…..(esp. when his change adds up while Sophia & I go to GA or GREECE)!