While emptying our house we were amazed at the coins we found throughout the house – in this drawer … in this box… in an old piggy bank. One method of dealing with t
he madness of clutter and stuff was to sort things into likeness piles. Don’t even ask me about pens and pencils! So the coins were also gathered into a box. One day I chose to sort and count. Would you believe we had 700 pennies! The stacks of larger value coins were smaller .. and then there were the foreign coins. Now we have been to Mexico and Canada but … Euros?
You may wonder how much time I wasted spent playing with the coins …. and maybe it was 
too much time – but an interesting exercise. It turns out that added to the 700 pennies ($7.00) the quarters and dimes and nickels added up to $10.00. And the foreign coins – well they will be added to all the paper pesos and saved for another time. So I deposited the $17.00 in the bank to add to the “fund”. Was it worth the time I spent? What is the cost?
That seems to be the question of the week for us … what is the cost? What is the cost of money? Or the cost of accumulating money? For the past 20 something years the cost has been maintaining steady safe jobs – mostly 40 hours a week in an office and commuting over an hour each day back and forth. To accumulate money. To buy the house, the cars, the toys, the food. On my coin counting day I probably spent an hour or so to “make” $17.00. Was it worth it? Well yes, probably. Could I accomplish that “worth” in different way? Or a better way? An interesting question.
We are looking forward to trying “it” a different way… hopefully a better way. So we continue our work to empty our home and make arrangements to start this quest.