I was reading a post over at my friend Shannon’s blog about her piggy bank dilemma. Shannon has a piggy bank for her son Andrew to collect extra coin and change around the house like most parents do. They wait till its full and then take it to the bank or a Coinstar location to get the cash.

Did you know that Coinstar can charge almost 10% and many banks are charging a fee to process bulk coin as well?

Didn’t this use to be a free service provided by the banks?

Many of the local banks here in the Northern Virginia charge a fee for even the most simple transactions. I would think that they would provide this service as they can always use “change” not to mention just being “customer service friendly”!

So getting back to Shannon’s dilemmia … she wanted to know what should she do? Well what we do most of the time is take the coin to our local credit union where the kids have a savings account and deposit it in there. (We use the Coinstar system currently but I think we’ll just count it ourselves) It’s usually a pretty small amount since its a weekly trip.

After looking at the Coinstar website, they do offer an alternative. If you put the money on a gift card (for places like Amazon, Starbucks, iTunes, etc , they do not charge you a fee. That might be a good idea if your child is saving for something in particular, like a new DS game or something.

Also if you’re near an AAFES PX, you can take it there and they’ll count it for you. They generally put it on a AAFES gift card for us. I don’t mind that because we take a trip to the PX weekly for misc. items, Burger King,etc.

Disclaimer – I can’t say anything negative about our “main” Bank — USAA– because they are located in San Antonio so we don’t deposit bulk coin. They have a great feature where you can bank from home too. All you have to do is scan in your checks. I’m telling ya it rocks! : )