Weekend Plans Post: The Last Piggybank
When Maribou and I first got married (back in the 90s), we had a change jar. It was the jar in which we threw our coins at the end of the day. Went out to eat? Throw the coins in the jar. Went to the movies? Throw the coins in the jar.
Our little unspoken rule was that we wouldn’t raid the jar unless it was for the cup holder in the car that needed coins for the parking meters downtown. Otherwise, the coins went in there and stayed there until the jar was full.
It was this jar, by the way:
A Maxwell House item, apparently. This jar held instant coffee back when Gerald Ford was still president. Then it held coins. The first time we filled it took a couple of years. The second time took a few years more. The third time took, like, *EIGHT* years.
And it was with this in mind that we thought about what to get the first friends in our circle for their kiddo when they had their first child. The first baby in our circle! Oh My Golly! There was stuff that we knew that the grandparents would get and we didn’t want to step on their toes. There was the stuff that they would be getting from elder brothers/sisters who had stuff that they didn’t need anymore… it was the year 2000 and we wanted to get a good gift that the parents would appreciate today and the kiddo would appreciate in a few years.
And so we decided to get a piggy bank. We got a (since discontinued) Little Tykes piggy bank (shown here):
We showed up a few hours after the announcement with a bucket of chicken (grabbed by the father with eyes that almost watered over as he started plowing into a leg) and the piggy bank and our best wishes. We met the baby, congratulated the proud parents, shook the hands of the grandparents, and got out of there.
Two days later, the dad called me (on a landline… it was still 2000) and said “Jaybird, everybody who visited put a couple of bills in the piggy bank! THANK YOU!”
And it was in that moment that I knew “Yep. Kiddos are going to be getting piggy banks when they are born in my circle.”
We were blessed to buy many piggy banks over the years. The Little Tykes one was our favorite but they discontinued it in the mid-oughts and we switched to Penny the Pig Piggy Bank. We’ve must have bought a dozen and a half piggy banks over the years. Nieces, Nephews, friends of friends… we had a small stash of them in the closet and, when we got the announcement, just grabbed one, threw a couple of quarters in there (it’s bad luck to give someone an empty piggy bank), and got in the car.
Well, in the same way that filling up the coin jar slowed down, our handing out of piggy banks slowed down too. And, just this week, I handed out the last piggy bank.
In the year 2000, it felt like such a great gift! Like, something the grandparents would not particularly prioritize but would be a great gift for any given honorary uncle.
And when I gave out this last one, it felt like I was giving the kid an 8-track player. And not, like, giving the kid an 8-track player when the Maxwell House Bicentennial Coffee was being sold, but, like, giving her one when the GameBoy was also on the shelves.
“I don’t know that she’ll get a lot of use out of it”, I said as I handed it to her dad (and we both laughed). But, you know, I gave one to her older siblings. It would seem wrong to not give one to the baby. Will we still be using coins when she’s old enough to have a conversation about the piggy bank she got way back in 2021?
Anyway, all that to say, I will spend this weekend feeling old.
So… what’s on your docket?
(Featured image is Penny the Pig Piggy Bank.)
If piggy banks are like depression old, then 529 gifts are like boomer much, so clearly you should just buy them NFTs of a second of video or something and hope irony survives 15 years or so.
*I have a piggy bank for my 1 year old son. It’s got some OG LOOT box magic let me tell youReport
Huh. The earliest known pig-shaped money containers date to the 12th century on the island of Java, according to the wikipedia.
The term “piggy bank” only goes back to the 40’s.
Huh.Report
UGMA… Universal Gift to Minor Act/Account
Are 529s Boomer or GenX? I’ve used the heck out of our 529s… but then I have like 40 kids and I think all but 3 are in college at right now.
But the UGMA is where the real action is at… well, if you can’t afford a proper trust fund and all that.
Now I just have to see if the accounts allow for bitcoin investing….Report
The bank w/ our safe deposit box recently announced it was closing(*) and I had to go grab my stuff and get out and don’t come back. I forgot about these U.S. savings bonds the um silent generation family gave my kids, its like found money if I can figure out what to do with them.
(*) Main branch downtown closing, where I used to have an office, but branches all over the city still around. Feels disconcerting. Over a hundred years ago they used to print notes that were considered valid national currency.Report
I was clearing out a drawer in my office and I found a $100 American Express Traveler’s Cheque that I’d ‘won’ at a job about 20-yrs ago.
I’m tempted to go to a Starbucks and offer to pay for their fine comestibles with three beans and this bearer bond which will entitle them to great wealth should they ever find a genie capable of reading its script.
I think my oldest has a $20 bond in our safe deposit box too. Nothing says I’d like to give you $10 but pretend that I’m giving you $20 20-years from now quite the same way.Report
I met an elderly woman once who was one of those cases of freaky corporate shares. Her husband died and in going through the trunks in the attic she found a stack of shares in some odd never-heard-of-it lumber company. Someone did the legwork on mergers and acquisitions and stock splits and they translated into several million dollars worth of Georgia Pacific (I think; might have been another giant). Anyway, the company honored them despite the decades.
I met her through my great uncle who ran away from home at age 16 and wound up the cook at a lumber camp in Montana. As he explained it, lumberjacks always get paid, then the mill operators, and the hands at the camp are last. When cash was short he agreed to take stock instead. He ended up owning, as he described it, an embarrassing amount of stock in one of the giants. He “collected” people like the old lady as a hobby.Report
I won $50 and $100 savings bonds for winning Wing- and Group-level “NCO of the quarter” competitions last century (I was a bit of a unicorn–a maintenance guy in a “REMF” Space Command unit who got deployed to a forward location–my chain of command saw a golden opportunity to get one over on the Ops crowd who always win everything because maintenance is invisible). I think they’re in the safety deposit box? And I think I tried to look up the serial numbers or something on the fed’s website and I got nothing, so I’m not even sure if they’re viable anymore.Report
Clearing out files in 2019 after my dad died, my mom found several hundreds of dollars in **UK** traveller’s cheques that were leftover from a trip they took there in 2004.
I helped her do the online work to redeem them, and trust me, it was a friggin’ JOURNEY. First to prove that she had a “right” to them (scanning in part of his will to attach) and second waiting for them to process 15 year old cheques, the original company which issued them apparently having gone bankrupt.
She eventually got the money for them but it was only after a chain of about 10 e-mails over perhaps five months….fortunately I think it got straightened out just before the pandemic got *really* bad.
I have some old, old treasury bonds in my safety deposit box I should probably look into cashing in….hm, maybe THAT’S where my new roof will come fromReport
I’m a “geriatric” X (born 1969) and 529s hit the scene a little late for them to be a thing for my college edumacation.
(I got monumentally lucky, though, in the lottery of life – my dads parents finished out their lives owning a very small set of rental cottages on Lake Michigan, which appreciated considerably in price before my dad and his brothers inherited them and decided to sell them and split the money three ways. And then we got lucky again with how he invested it – pulling it out to a more secure investment shortly before the crash of 1987. I paid for three years at an out-of-state Public Ivy on that, my brother paid for a couple years at a SLAC, and there was enough leftover for each of us to have help with downpayments on our houses….)Report
My son has an elephant bank. It’s the same as a piggy bank, except that it’s an elephant. Since all the parking meters have gone to an app it’s slim pickens for him. Every once in awhile his grandparents will bring over a sandwich baggie with coins for him to deposit. I have no idea how they end up with them.
This is my final weekend before starting a new job after 3 full weeks off. I think it’s the most time I’ve had since the crater following the financial crisis. And that was really stressful time off since it wasn’t exactly voluntary. I have a full docket of Halloween activities with my son. Pumpkin carving, neighborhood s’mores and costume parade, then of course the trick or treating. My goal is to really bask in the dwindling lack of professional responsibility before hitting the ground running Monday.Report
Congrats on the new job!
Have you seen those newfangled marshmallows that have chocolate embedded? I purchased a bag but the bag never made it to a campfire…Report
Thank you! And I have not, but I can easily imagine that not even surviving the drive home from the grocery store.Report
Best of luck.
Once again, my reading too fast gets me in trouble. “My son has an elephant trunk”?Report
Ha!Report
A pachy bank?Report
I like it.Report
My docket is FULL. Standing in the rain to officiate a rd. 1 football playoff game tonight. Seeing a friend’s band tomorrow, then hightailing it over to a wedding party. Golf at a country club Sunday. Maybe I can be in a Briggs cartoon.
I have a change jar, too. It’s a Hillsboro Hops mug that I got at the last LeagueFest. I’d empty it out, but banks have done away with their counting machines. They’ll still take them, but you have to bring in rolls. Who’s gonna do that?Report
Banks have no more counting machines? That’s horrid. No wonder there is a coin shortage.Report
Here, Safeway had a counting machine, but it charges about 10%.Report
I hear ya, looks like I’ll be sitting in that rain tomorrow am when first day of black powder season opens.Report
It was really bad. The game was on a grass field, which was absolutely destroyed by the end of the game. The subs coming in at the end of the game looked funny with their clean uniforms.Report
Maribou and I have had a conversation and it has been decided that tomorrow I will be making The Spaghetti Sauce.Report
Spaghetti Sauce is now in the crock pot.
And so… we wait.Report
I dunno what I’m doing. Online knitting group is tomorrow, I missed the last one because I needed to get out of town or I was gonna lose my stuff, so I might attend at least part of this one. I also want to get out to the small (very small) local gourmet shop to see if there are any other things I might want to get anyone as a holiday gift (yes I’m doing it obnoxiously early but I see certain relatives at Thanksgiving and it saves me having to mail the stuff later).
we’re FINALLY getting seasonal weather so I am contemplating making a pot of the rather-involved bean soup I make a couple times a winter (recipe is from my vintage-1974 Winnie the Pooh cookbook (yes, really) that friends of the family gave me when I was a small child. The recipes are fairly sophisticated and I mostly didn’t like them as a kid, but as an adult, I make the bean soup and also the creamed salmon fairly regularlyReport
Got an early start by doing 20 miles on the bicycle. Today is as close to a perfect fall day as is likely to occur, even by Front Range standards.
Halloween, in a Front Range tradition, is forecast to have a high of 43, some rain in the afternoon turning to snow showers as it gets dark.Report
That’s awesome. Today turned out to be a great day for riding here, even despite the floods yesterday. I somehow fit in a 21.5 mile ride post pumpkin carving and pre costume parade. I am exhausted but it was beautiful out on the trail. Saw little rapids on the water and everything.Report
Conjunction of ill-timed events. Hall pass with my wife going to stay with our daughter for a few days, but I have a lot of work this weekend. Son (last-minuting) college app, but likely to disappear when done. No Halloween plan; may just turn off the lights and hide Sunday evening.Report
We’ve got a change jar as well–it’s a decorative 2-foot-tall decorative twisted glass thingy that we probably bought at Pier One Imports (remember those?). In the olden days it took about two years to fill it. Now it takes muuuuuuch longer. It can in handy a couple of years back when our washer died and I had to truck the laundro to the mat to get it done–raided the jar for quarters for the machines. Right now it is most useful when deployed as a door stop.Report