Somewhere in our house were containers filled with loose change accumulated over an unknown number of years – and as part of our $32K → $0 family debt journey, we finally decided to find out exactly how much money was hiding in them.
Some of it had survived moving houses and being moved around.
Some of it had survived children.
Some of it had apparently survived a flood.
Some of it scattered across the property, for which we are still waiting for the elusive money tree to sprout.
And today, all of it was being evicted.
We’ve officially started our $32K → $0 family debt journey, and one of the rules we’ve set ourselves is pretty simple:
If money belongs to us and we deliberately use it to reduce our debt, it counts as Debt Smashed by Us.
That includes income. It includes money we save. It includes things we sell. It includes unexpected money.
And apparently, it also includes the forgotten collection of 5c, 10c, 20c, 50c, $1 and $2 coins occupying various containers around the house.
So today, we went treasure hunting in our own cupboards.
First question: how much does our “loose change” weigh?
Before we started counting, curiosity got the better of us.
We put the entire collection on the bathroom scales – containers, coins, screws, leaves and assorted archaeological specimens included.
17.8 kilograms.
At that point, calling it “a bit of loose change” may have been underselling the situation.
And naturally, before doing the sensible thing and actually counting it, we did some maths.
An Australian 5c piece weighs about 2.83 grams. If the entire 17.8 kg had somehow consisted entirely of 5c pieces, we’d have been looking at roughly $314.50 worth of echidnas.
Thankfully, we could already see plenty of considerably more financially ambitious denominations in there.
So we started sorting.
Step one: commandeer the gold fossicking station
Apparently the appropriate piece of equipment for sorting nearly 18 kilograms of accumulated household currency is the same station normally used for gold fossicking.
Seems appropriate.
The operation quickly developed several investment categories:
5c. 10c. 20c. 50c. $1. $2. Screws. Leaves. WTF.
Some of these coins have had a more adventurous life than most currency probably expects.
A portion went through a flood and emerged considerably less shiny than the Royal Australian Mint originally intended.
They’re still money, though.
And money sitting filthy in a container is currently doing precisely $0 worth of debt smashing.
Place your bets
Before the sorting began, four of us wrote down estimates for how much money we thought was hiding in the collection.
D1: $575
D2: Somewhere in the $500s
J1: $256
J2: $295
There were no prizes.
There was, however, considerable opportunity for bragging rights.
And then we counted.
And counted.
And counted.
Did we mention that we counted?
The eventual tally of bankable Australian currency was:
| Coin | Number found | Value |
|---|---|---|
| 5c | 220 | $11.00 |
| 10c | 938 | $93.80 |
| 20c | 641 | $128.20 |
| 50c | 73 | $36.50 |
| $1 | 9 | $9.00 |
| $2 | 40 | $80.00 |
| TOTAL | 1,921 | $358.50 |
1,921 coins.
And somehow 938 of them were 10c pieces.
We apparently spent several years establishing a privately operated reserve of Australian dimes that Australia doesn’t actually call dimes.
And the winner is…
The final bankable total of $358.50 means J2 takes the inaugural Jays n Dees:
“Apparently Better at Estimating Jars of Money Than Everyone Else” Award.
His $295 guess was only $63.50 short.
J1 was $102.50 short.
D2 was… somewhere substantially north.
And D1 looked at the enormous pile and confidently estimated $575.
Apparently D1 had assigned a rather aggressive market value to the screws, leaves and bugs.
The final weigh-in
Once everything had been sorted, the six zip-lock bags of Australian coins weighed approximately 15.5 kg.
The bags themselves weigh roughly 3 grams each, putting the actual coins somewhere around 15.48 kg.
So somewhere around 2.3 kg of our original weigh-in disappeared into containers, debris and the various other things that had apparently joined our investment portfolio over the years.
And remember our hypothetical $314.50 worth of 5c pieces?
Using the much more accurate sorted coin weight, 15.48 kg entirely in 5c pieces would only be worth roughly $273.55.
Our mixed collection produced $358.50.
Apparently diversification works.
Our international investment portfolio
The excavation also produced a few things that aren’t joining the bank deposit.
We found:
- an Australian 1c piece
- a special 2016 Australian 10c piece commemorating 50 years of decimal currency
- a New Zealand 10c piece
- a Singapore 10-cent coin
So apparently we’ve been investing internationally as well.
Nobody remembers authorising this strategy.
The 2016 commemorative 10c is staying with us rather than being sacrificed to the banking machine for ten cents, and the others have been separated from the Australian currency.
But wait. Apparently we have more money.
There is one other small problem.
Somewhere in this house is a collection of winning scratchies, carefully stored in an Extremely Safe Place™.
Unfortunately, the defining feature of an Extremely Safe Place™ is that nobody can remember where it is.
From memory, there may be around 20 of them, with prizes ranging from roughly $2 to $12.
For reasons that probably made perfect sense at the time, we scratched them, discovered that we’d won money…
…and then apparently decided that actually obtaining the money was an optional second step.
So we now need to locate our hidden investments.
When we find them and cash them, whatever they produce will be added to our Debt Smashed by Us total as well.
Debt Smash #1
For now, though, we have a confirmed result:
Loose change: $358.50 – See update below
Yesterday, that $358.50 was sitting in containers around our house.
Some of it was dirty.
Some had been through a flood.
Some was sharing accommodation with screws and leaves.
None of it was helping us.
Now it has a job.
$358.50 is going against our debt. The updated figure is actually $377.10!
It isn’t $32,000.
It doesn’t need to be.
This whole journey isn’t going to be solved by one enormous financial miracle. It’s going to be tackled with the money we earn, the money we save, the things we sell, the decisions we make – and apparently the occasional 15.5 kg pile of coins.
Yesterday this money was sitting around doing nothing.
Today it’s debt we don’t owe anymore.
We’ll take that win.
UPDATE: Apparently We Can’t Count
A few days later, we hauled the entire collection into the bank to finally turn our mountain of coins into debt-smashing money.
After around half an hour feeding coins into the machine, we were left with a stubborn little collection that it simply refused to accept. Those were taken inside the bank for final processing.
And then came the surprise.
Our carefully counted total at home was $358.50.
The bank’s final total?
$377.10.
Apparently somewhere among nearly 2,000 coins, we’d managed to lose $18.60 through the highly sophisticated financial process known as “not counting properly.”
So D1 has now demonstrated an inability to both guess the value of a giant pile of coins and count it accurately.
Thankfully, banks have machines for this sort of thing.
The important part is that the final, bank-confirmed amount is:
💥 $377.10 DEBT SMASHED 💥
This is part of our $32K → $0 – Our Family Debt Journey.
We’re documenting what we’re doing ourselves as well as the support we receive along the way. You can follow our progress, see our live totals, read the full story and even find ways to help us for $0 on our campaign page.
$32,000 is the fundraising target.
$0 debt is the destination.
