After thinking about what to do with all my coins and knowing that my nephew would laugh at the $5 dollar offer I was going to make I have decided to go to the coinstar machine and get an amazon gift certificate or is it a eCertificate?. That way I don’t have to do the work myself because I know that I wouldn’t finish anytime soon. Now I can get some stuff, cd’s, movies or maybe even some new video games, there is an idea. The next question becomes what to go get?, videos, music, books or whatever that tickles my fancy. One thing is for sure, I better do it soon because I already have some coins from this year waiting to go into that Coin Counting Jar. 

The first 403-B report of the year is here at its new home for the foreseeable future or until it gets evicted whichever comes first. The new year started with a bang investing wise as we all know and when I saw how it kept going south, I just watched when it crossed the border, I went hmm, and when it reached the equator I just sat back, relaxed and waited because there was nothing I could do to make it better. So lets check and see how the new year is treating me so far, on to the numbers.

Last week was a bad week for stocks as we all know. The market was down and down and it just kept going down hill it seemed to me. That is the way it is, you win some and you lose some. It kinda makes me wonder about opening an account and start trading like I wanted to. My main worry since I am just a regular guy is that I am going to lose all my hard earned moola but then again if I don’t do it why do it at all, right?. At some point you just have to do what you have to do and let ride. I do have a question about the Dow, after what we saw last week shouldn’t it be called the Down?. Hey, I am just curious about it nothing more. I am hoping this week is much better than last that is for sure.

If you read my last post on how much I saved between July and December of 2007 then you know that I have a Coin Counting Jar. Every year I put in there every single coin I get as change and at the end of the year I change all those coins into greenbacks. As you can see from the picture below the amount shown is $124.98, but I know that it is a little more than that because I remember that sometimes it didn’t count some coins, nothing is perfect after all. The amount could be close to $140 I think but I won’t know until I change all those coins. Now comes the hard part, do I take it to my the Coinstar machine or do I roll all those coins myself and take it to the bank?. Coinstar charges “8.9 cents per dollar counted” according to their website and that doesn’t make sense for somebody who is trying to make money like I am, right? but to be fair they do offer to change your coins for free when you “turn your coins into Gift Card or eCertificate”, again according to their website. That is more appealing than the 8.9 cents. Rolling them myself costs nothing but a few hours of hard and tedious work, or I can pay my nephew $5 dollars and let him do it, bingo. As soon as I find out what the exact amount is I’ll let you know.

The way I usually save money is to put away $50 away each paycheck, sometimes I have to use it but sometimes if I stick to my budget I don’t. Every six months I take and start thinking what to do with it. The last six months I managed to save $1,400 dollars. Here is the breakdown, $650 dollars from my paychecks, $100 plus dollars from my coin counting jar, more on that in another post, and then there is the other $650 dollars of which I know $400 came from my last paycheck because I was on Christmas break so I didn’t spend that much and that leaves me with $250 dollars that I honestly don’t remember where it came from.

Now comes the hard part, what to do with all that money. One thing I already did was to pay off my laptop so $400 dollars that I owed have been paid which means that Sunshine, that is the name of my computer, is all mine. I put the remaining $900 dollars in my checking account and now I am thinking of what to do with that money. I think I am going to open an account with a broker and start investing. Whatever happens you’ll be the first to know.