Spare Change

I’m looking forward to the new coins coming in, as the current ones are so heavy they hole your pockets after a while.

Not sure what most people do, but when I get home I empty my pockets out and throw any spare change into a jar. Except my jar got full so I then used a spare drawer.

Now with the existing silver coins ceasing to be legal tender late this year, and noting my collection of coins had got quite big, I decided it was probably time to count it and bank it.

Ouch. Turned out I had a total of 1,601 NZ coins. The exact breakdown being:

$0.05 389 $19.45
$0.10 283 $28.30
$0.20 351 $70.20
$0.50 340 $170.00
$1.00 121 $121.00
$2.00 117 $234.00

Total 1601 $642.95

I needed a knapsack to carry it to the bank, and you should have seen their face when I showed them what I wanted to bank. However when they realised I had pre-sorted and pre-counted it they were much relieved.

On top of the NZ currency, I also had leftover foreign currency. The foreign coins can’t be banked but they probably only come to $50 or so.

However the foreign banknotes can be cashed, and I was again surprised by how many I had once I counted them all:

US Dollars 100 = $286.18
Malaysian Ringgits 38 = $16.57
Thai Bahts 1,160 = $49.05
Sri Lanka Rupees 50 = $0.77
UK Pounds 30 = $85.18
Chinese Yuan 11 = $2.18
Australian Dollars 105 = 124.40
Euros 180 = $354.21
Canadian Dollars 55 = 76.92
Japanese Yen 6,000 = 83.17

Total = $1,078.63

So in total I had over $1,700 in that drawer. I suddenly feel richer. That gets me a trip the Great Barrier Reef 🙂