"Brother, Can You Spare a Dime (or 500 of them)?": Found Change Charity Fund 2017 Results!

As usual, I meant to post this blog shortly after new year, but it took me a couple of weeks to get around to tallying up the lost (or discarded) loot that made its way from someone else's pocket into my own throughout last year before finally making its way to a charitable end! 

For those of you new to the concept, for many moons (at least 150 moons by my rough count) I've been pocketing money I come across on floors and sidewalks, and adding it to my annual Found Change Charity Fund and donating the total each January to the Sean McGrath Fund. And then I've been asking you to follow suit with a matching donation, as I will once again later in this post! 

So let's do away with the intrigue and get right down to the tally, shall we? Here's the breakdown, both numerically and visually:

20.00 x 0 = $0.00

5.00 = $0.00

1.00 x 0 = $0.00

.25 x 6 = $1.50
.10 x 44 = $4.40
.05 x 14 = $0.70
.01 x 300 - $3.00

At first I was shocked that I didn't encounter a single piece of lost paper money this year, but then I realized that as we increasingly become a cashless society, it makes perfect sense that actual lost currency would face a similar decline. Unfortunately, this doesn't bode well for the long-term success of the FCCF (Found Change Charity Fund...did you forget already?).

Also extraordinary this year is the total lack of any foreign currency, since in years past, I've found shekels and pence from places as far afield as Peru, Hong Kong, the UAE, Britain, Canada, Israel, Switzerland, Aruba, and the Euro zone. Although once again, upon further reflection, this probably shouldn't be such a shock, as foreign travel to the United States has dropped considerably since last January 20, resulting in millions fewer visitors to our shores, and billions fewer overseas dollars spent here.

Well, one thing that hasn't changed is that every subway rider needs a MetroCard (at least for now...though increasingly less so leading up to the 2023 phaseout), and I ran across five abandoned cards this year which still held a combined value of $13.09 in subway fare. That bought me five rides for which I didn't pay a cent, so that amount goes into the hopper too!

That means that this year, the not-so-grand total is the comparatively paltry sum of $23.58, the second-lowest year since I've been tracking results on this space:

2011 - $49.23       2012 - $45.65       2013 - $17.55
2014 - $63.13      2015 - $113.51     2016 - $43.38

Part of this annual tradition has been to separate out some of the coins that time has treated most roughly, and to thank them for their service before they're returned to the U.S. Mint and destroyed. Here are a couple of shots of this year's graduating class.

So now we find ourselves at the portion of the blog where I ask YOU, dear reader, to make a matching gift to the Sean McGrath Fund...except this year having been such a low amount, I'm asking you to make a donation at least double the amount that I found. To save you precious calculation time, that comes to $47.16.

If I've convinced you to make a donation, just hit the orange button on the PACF site and make sure you specify "Sean McGrath Fund" in your note.

And whether or not you choose to make a financial gift, I hope you'll consider setting aside your own canister to track the spare change you find throughout 2018, and to donate the total to your favorite charity next year!

Thanks for reading, and for all the little things you do to help change the world.