Accumulating change

For the longest time, I stayed away from my debit or credit cards, prefering to use cash for my purchases. During this time, I was able to accumulate quite a bit of loose change over a short period of time. All the change from every dollar I spent would end up in my change jar, and eventually in my brokerage account.

Nowadays, I find that I end up using my plastic more than cash, which means that accumulating enough change to make a meaningful stock purchase takes quite a bit longer. My last deposit of about $74 took between 6 and 9 months, so long I can't exactly remember how long it took. When using cash in the same period of time would yield a deposit of $150 or so, almost double!

The past couple days, I've been eating out for lunch, yeilding 50¢ for my savings. As of today, there's probably about $3 in change, not much but it's a start.