Why I Still Collect My Change in an Old Peanut Butter Jar
By: G M Potter
Tags: Money, Personal Finance, Saving, Coins, Personal Development

Why I Still Collect My Change in an Old Peanut Butter Jar

Photo by Autumn Mott Rodeheaver on Unsplash

This may come as a shock, but peanut butter jars have changed over the years. They weren’t made of plastic some time ago, and this is just one item on a long list of disappointments for me.

When I was a boy, and even when I grew to become a legal age adult, I could buy peanut butter at the store in a glass jar with a tin top. No matter the brand, peanut butter came in a very useful container that I often used for something special once the peanut butter was gone.

The tin-top made it especially important

Another item on my growing list of disappointments is the absence of cash in the world. I don’t mean the lack of money. I have plenty of money. I mean the absence of cash in transactions. I understand that this is a growing trend, and the acolytes of technology can’t say no. Perhaps much of who I am is still analog, and money has become digital.

I try to use cash whenever possible. Doing so is just simpler; it makes the transaction final somehow, and in a child-like way, I really like the consequence of getting the change back at the end of it. My hand is open to receive the coins long before the cashier totals the purchase and prints a receipt.

Photo by Michael Longmire on Unsplash

Those coins that many people see as an inconvenience, and are the consequence of using cash, taught me valuable lessons about money.

I’m old now. I’m not a boy or even a couple of years into legal adult status. I’m 59 years old, chronologically speaking. I still use cash, and I still cherish the pennies, nickels, dimes, and a few quarters the cashier hands back to me before I leave the store, even if it is a computer-controlled change machine that spits the coins out into a small plastic tray. I collect them and drop them into my pocket all the same.

And because I’m old now, I still cling to some of the habits I developed as a boy. I still have a peanut butter jar that holds all of the coins I collect. The problem, a few years ago, was finding a jar that wasn’t made of plastic.

I found one at a garage sale that is still a prized possession of mine.

It is a big jar, much bigger than the plastic jars on grocery shelves today. This jar is made of glass, and the paper label that once declared the brand of peanut butter is long gone. Even the strips of glue that held the label to the glass has washed away.

When I was a boy, my mom made a piggy bank out of a used peanut butter jar for me. She cut a slit in the top so I could drop coins into the jar just like any piggy bank in the world. This is why a tin top is so necessary. You can’t cut a slit in a plastic top.

Each time I would drop coins into this piggy bank, I would hear the tink, tink of metal coin against glass. That sound made it real for me.

That sound made the act of saving a real thing for me

Years ago, I found an old “antique” peanut butter jar at a garage sale. When my wife saw what I was clutching in my arms, she rolled her eyes out of impatience but also from some admitted amusement. The woman who was selling it to me focused her greedy eyes on me, intent on selling me this glass jar with a tin top for far more than it was really worth. I think I paid 4 bucks for it.

I didn’t stop clutching the glass jar until I got home, found a screwdriver and a hammer, and punched a slit in the tin-top just like my mother did for me years before.

Like I said, I’m old now, but I still have the glass jar with its tin top. I still use it as a piggy bank. I drop all of my change into the jar every evening, no matter if it's only a few pennies or if there are quarters and dimes involved.

Photo by Eduardo Soares on Unsplash

An item that is not on my list of disappointments is a resource my bank provides to me for free. I bring in my peanut butter jar full of coins, they drop the coins into a coin counter and then credit my bank account with the added amount.

I’m an old guy, and I can’t imagine losing the tangible feature of money that I grew up with and what became so intertwined with the concepts of saving money, collecting it, and investing it. Having this physical sensation of money makes it real for me. Money is not just an idea. Money is a tangible thing in this world.

My brokerage account statement, the 401(K) statement, and even the mortgage statement are all printed on paper and arrive in the mail each month because of this same requirement. Just like the coins I collected as boy, these account statements have to be touched, have to be a physical thing, in order for me to feel the sense of wealth they represent.

Money has always been an idea, an agreement, or a social convention, and it has always had a physical token that represented it as well. Whether money was seashells or gold coins, wealth was counted by what was in your hands or at the end of rope in the case of sheep or livestock counting as wealth.

Photo by Dmitry Demidko on Unsplash

When money becomes only an idea, a computer tally, a distant horn blowing and declaring one more dollar is added to some “virtual” register somewhere, money and the wealth it can represent loses the basis it has for being wealth. It can no longer be seen as a store of value but only a number or a subtotal.

I can’t imagine having any innate knowledge of my wealth without this sensation of coins or bills being the end result. If I can’t create these coins or bills from an account at some bank, the wealth loses its physicality, and this is what registers as wealth for me.

I know what money feels like, even if it is only quarters, dimes, and nickels on a bed of pennies in a glass jar with a tin top and slit cut in it. I can touch it. I can feel it. It has weight, and it is something that exists in the world.

I’m an old guy, and I’ve learned how to manage money that appears to me on account statements without my ability to touch it, but I still need the glass jar with the tin-top to remind me what it feels like even if the wealth it represents is only a fraction of the virtual total.