KidTip: The greening of the American dollar

When you think of a dollar, what comes to mind?

• The face of Sacagawea and her babe in papoose on the golden dollar coin
• The Susan B. Anthony dollar coin
• The new presidential dollar coin
• Or good old George Washington on a crinkly, crumpled one-dollar greenback

For me, it's George Washington and the paper dollar, every time. You may have noticed that the US Mint would like to change that. They have been actively advertising that dollar coins are the greener choice since they last much longer than paper dollars and are 100% recyclable.

What needs to happen in our family to embrace the greening of these dollar coins is:

• stop sticking them in the piggy bank, which is what I've done with dollar coins since I was a kid, and have been training my kids to do. Dollar coins seemed rare and precious. They seemed like keepers instead of spenders. So quite accidentally we're keeping good money out of circulation, but never failing to use those paper bills.

• we also need to get some, most likely by going to the bank and requesting them. Otherwise I imagine they just remain in various change tills, and don't get used.
• we need to think first of the change purse as having money worth spending instead of automatically reaching for the bills in the wallet. I've done this since I was a kid -- the change purse never got you very far outside of a candy store. I also found this a challenge when I lived in France and had to pay for things with French francs. What I noticed when I moved there was most people carried around a hefty sized change "purse" for lack of a better word (men used them as well). Because you could dig out a 20-franc piece and that was real money. The centimes were pretty much worthless like our pennies, nickels and dimes. I haven't been to Europe since they switched to Euros, so I don't know nuthin' about that.

Back to dollars. I think I will take the great suggestion from our other blog to get a stash of dollar coins from the bank to put under the kids' pillows for Tooth Fairy visits. Then I will encourage the kids to spend them, not stick them in their piggy banks to gather dust.

Are you using the dollar coin in its many versions?