For just pennies a day, you could help feed a starving kid that'll just grow up to father another bunch of starving kids...

...or you can buy a really sweet tv. :D

I've been wanting a big screen tv for a very long time, but I wouldn't buy one until I could get hi-def service, because I hate stretching the image to fit the wider aspect ratio of the tv. DirecTV finally added the albany stations in HD recently, so we decided it was time. I had been saving my spare change for a while... somewhere around 10-12 years. I had a giant plastic beer bottle full of change that I'd been adding to for a long time. It weighed too much for me to carry it upstairs, so it's been sitting in our foyer since we moved into the house a year and a half ago.

On Saturday Kristin decided that it was time for the tv. I poured the change into a 5 gallon pail so that I could carry it to the Coinstar machine at the Big Y. The change filled approximately 2/3 of the 5 gallon pail, and it weighed over a HUNDRED POUNDS!



Carrying this 100lb bohemith was a feat in itself. The 5 gallon pail was barely able to hold up to the strain, and I wasn't doing much better with trying to carry it. I lugged it into the Big Y, and immediately drew a crowd. The coinstar machine is great because you don't have to deal with the pain in the ass of rolling it all... which honestly, for me, wouldn't have been possible considering how much change we're talking about. The problem with coinstar is that they take 9% of your total, which in my case, would have been a fairly significant amount of money. But... you have the option of getting your redemption on a gift card instead of cash, and when you do that, you get the full value of your change... i.e. no 9% fee. Circuit City was one of the gift card options, so we did that. Below, you can see our totals from our receipt:


So... off to Circuit City we go! We intended to head to Keene to get our new TV in order to save on sales tax. Unfortunately, Keene didn't carry the TV I wanted. Of course, thanks to the fact that Circuit City only employs idiot teens who don't know anything about their job, it took me most of the day (and 3 different sales guys over the phone) to learn this. So, we headed to Holyoke after dinner on Saturday for our TV. In addition to our $782 in coin money, DirecTV also gives you $300 off any HD TV when you sign up for DirecTV Hi-def service, which we intended to do anyway. So, all totalled, we only wound up spending a few hundred dollars out of pocket for our snazzy new Sony KDF-50E3000 that now resides in our living room. :)