Picking up pennies? Do you do it?

So here is a question that has come into my mind recently: does anyone else pick pennies up off the ground anymore? I started wondering this as I was hitting CVS for free batteries and I was always finding at least one penny on the floor by the checkout if I bothered to look down. This made me wonder if I’m the only one left that picks them up.

From a practical standpoint, picking up pennies in itself probably does little for your financial health. If you were to find one penny each day and at the end of each year deposit it in an account earning 5% APY, in 30 years you would have $242.50. Sounds like a decent amount, except when you remember that is picking up a penny every day for 30 years! And considering inflation, will $242.50 really be worth very much? Your life probably won’t be changed forever because of those little pennies you picked up.

There may be a psychological benefit to picking up pennies. A lot of people believe that finding a penny heads up brings you luck if you pick it up. Of course you could take the attitude of my youngest brother-in-law, who as a young child said that you should pick up pennies that are tails up too because just finding money at all is lucky.

I think one of the most interesting takes on the question came from my wife, who said that it was bad karma not to pick up pennies. The thought is that if you make the conscious decision that a penny is not worth picking up, then where does it stop? If you don’t value the smallest amounts of money, eventually you fall into the state where you don’t value larger amounts of money. If you don’t value your money, you don’t deserve to have financial prosperity because you’ve already demonstrated that you didn’t appreciate the financial gifts you had been given, no matter how small.

Myself? I am a compulsive penny picker-upper. Heads up. Tails up. I don’t care. It’s all good. Money is money, and getting some of it for nothing is always lucky. That’s my two cents, which I found on the floor by the register at CVS. =)