Cheap Trick Thursday: convert your coins to gift cards with Coinstar; get $10
If you're looking for some extra cash for holiday gifts, perhaps you might consider shaking out the sofa cushions and breaking your piggy bank after hearing about this deal from Coinstar.
Ordinarily, you take your metal money to a Coinstar machine and convert it into more easily stored bills in exchange for a fee of 8.9 percent. Or, you could exchange your coins for a valuable gift card to Amazon.com, iTunes or Old Navy or some other retailer* that you could use to buy something special for yourself or a loved one at this time of year.
And if you do that ...
.. you could mail in the bottom half of your receipt to Coinstar and get another gift card to the same retailer worth $10 (discovered via Erin Huffstetler's Frugal Living blog).
More details on the Coinstar $10 holiday bonus gift cards here, but the offer expires Dec. 7, so get your spare change to a machine soon! Don't forget to double-check that your local Coinstar machine offers gift cards --- not all of them do.
Or, you could just haul your water cooler jug full of pennies to banks that offer free coin-counting to their members, like The Columbia Bank. Often those banks also charge percentage fees to non-members, like 5 percent. And then you're not committed to spending this cold metal money at a specific retailer. Are there any others out there?
Or you could roll your coins, or save them for parking meters, or (gasp) use them in brick-and-mortar stores.
What do you do with your coins?
*You could select a Circuit City gift card ... but why would you deliberately choose a card for a bankrupt business?
Comments
I did this recently. I went to a Coinstar machine (beware: I had to go to 4 stores before I found one that was working AND gave gift cards) and got an Amazon.com gift card for change I had been throwing into a coin bank for a few years. I was shocked that it added up to more than $340! Since Amazon sells so many things, I figure I just found my Christmas shopping money.
Linda, that's fantastic ... thanks for the warning and hope you saved your receipt for that extra $10! --- lfk.
Posted by: Linda | November 20, 2008 8:25 AM