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Comment by tarboreus | Hacker News Reader

I personally love $5 and $10 bills. I frequently do exact change when I have a bunch of those. Buying a BLT at the bodega? That's $5.75 with a coke. Here's $6. At the end of the day, I fire my change in a bucket and bring it to a machine once a year to get exchanged.

Also, taking out $100 in 2017 is silly, at least if you spend more than $200 a week, which is most non-students here. I just get out the max that the ATM will let me have and I never regret it.

"But what if I get mugged?" This is silly. If you actually do get mugged, you want to have a big load of money on you, not $3.29. Happy muggers mean fewer dead programmers.

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This works less well with other currencies

If you're working with euros your largest denomination coin is 2€ . In Yen it's 500 yen! This is not chump change and just throwing those coins into the charity box can leave you with effectively increasing your lunch pricing by 50% if you have a "give all coins to charity" policy.

If you have the cash for it more power to you, of course.

Who said anything about charity?

Ah, I think I misread the original comment to be something like "drop the coins in the tip jar". Please disregard.

OP is dumping the change at home, then converting it to bills all at once.

That works even when coins have non-trivial value.

Ignoring the coin jar/charity box confusion, I've tended to keep the bigger coins around and just spend them - a few £1-2 coins don't weigh that much, aren't taking up a great deal of room and will buy your lunch entirely. Then they're not your problem any more.

500 yen's over £3, so I'm guessing you don't get many of those in your lunch change? The top result for "how much is lunch in Japan" [1] suggests that your 500 yen coin would just about cover the next day's lunch and is lighter (barely; 7 grams versus 8.75g) than a British one pound coin [2,3].

The coin sorting machines that you might tip a coin jar into take a decent chunk of your money for the privilege of counting it (e.g. CoinStar charge 9.9% [4]).

1: https://www.withhusbandintow.com/costs-to-eat-in-japan/

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_pound_(British_coin)

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/500_yen_coin

4: http://www.coinstar.co.uk/FAQ

If fewer people carry cash around, there's less of an incentive to mug people for their cash.

This is strictly true, but IMO a better argument against iPhones than against cash.

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