How to Turn Coins into Gift Cards or eCertificates for FREE!

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coin-jar At some point not long after my toddler years, I would have been considered an avid coin collector. I think it was my grandfather who got me into it since he would occasionally show off this wide array of strange foreign coins from his time as a soldier during WWII and beyond. One Christmas, a very long time ago, he gave my brother and I a bunch of generic blue hard cardboard collector’s albums that snapped in all sorts of change denominations for safe keeping. We viewed these books as a measure of collecting prowess and this friendly sibling competition kept us busy for years.

I spent about a decade checking my change on a regular basis looking for those elusive ‘wheat pennies’ and pre-1964 silver nickles that would round out a complete collection. I can still remember the sticky feeling on my fingers after spending hours counting, stacking and rolling coins so I could deposit them in my very own passport blue book savings account. I used to love writing my account number on the rolls and watching the ink-stamped total of my savings grow in that little gold-eagle embossed book.

As I passed into adulthood, the pure joy I felt as a kid for coin collecting faded, the sticky fingers and rolling became a slight nuisance until evolving to battery-powered coin sorters. Holding onto a bucket-load of coins for a ‘rainy day’ must have been a habit instilled in my family because we all still have humongous reservoirs for holding our change until it can’t hold another cent. Probably more out of procrastination than any other reason, but I like to think we had the foresight to envision a future when a company like Coinstar would free us from our penny rolling ways.

Coinstar was founded in 1991, and their first coin counting machines were installed in 1992 in the San Francisco Bay area. Since then they have continually expanded throughout the U.S. and beyond to become the global company they are today which is… prepare yourself… a 1.2 billion dollar company with machines in 140 countries worldwide.

Their plan was simple: provide a service for people that transformed a task that most would consider a time-wasting nuisance into one that was a time-saving convenience. And Wala! A global 600 coins per minute sorting powerhouse was born. The service isn’t free if you want to simply turn your change into cash. Coinstar charges a fee of 8.9% for their standard ‘Coins to Cash’ service. But you aren’t limited to that option. Many of their machines offer the ability to load the value of your sorted coins onto a gift card or eCertificate at no charge. Here are some of the more well known brands: Amazon.com, AMC Theaters, Borders, CVS Pharmacy, iTunes, JCPenny, Lowes, Old Navy, Overstock.com, and Starbucks among others.

In addition ‘Coins for Cash’ and Gift Cards or eCerts, Coinstar provides many more options about what you can do with the change dumped into their machines. One of the other convenient methods of obtaining the funds is having them deposited directly into a bank account with ‘Direct Coin Deposit’. After your coins are tallied, swipe your debit card and enter your PIN. The coin value, less any fees charged by your bank/credit union, will be deposited automatically into your primary account. This is usually only two or three dollars and depending on the value of your deposit is cheaper than the 8.9% fee while still getting immediate access to your money.

You can also get airtime on many wireless and Long Distance Cards, have your funds loaded onto a Prepaid Debit/Cash Cards, as well as a way to donate to charity through their ‘Coins that Count’ program which is a partnership among Coinstar, non-profit organizations, and their retail partners. The Coins that Count donation feature allows customers to donate their spare change to a participating non-profit organization and immediately receive a tax-deductible receipt for the full value of their donation.

That pretty much covers what Coinstar is all about (at least related to coins. They also recently purchased outright ownership of redbox, those $1 per night DVD rental vending machines you see outside almost any Walmart).

On their site in the upper right corner you can locate a Coinstar machine nearest you and discover what services are provided by that machine such as applying funds to Gift Cards, Debit Cards, etc.

Source: Coinstar, redbox