Check out this picture below.

If I asked you how many 20 Croatian kuna (20 HRK ~ 3 USD) bills you can see, what would you say? 100? 200? Over 9000? It’s not easy to tell but the story behind it is quite interesting. Don’t worry. I’ll let you know how much I saved in the end :)

Somewhere in December 2017 I read on Reddit about a guy who was saving up every $5 bill he had in his wallet for a full year and in the end collected something like $1200.

This piqued my interested so I wanted to do pretty much the same thing. The challenge was simple. Every time I got a 20 kuna bill in change, I would just put it away in a box. I would do that from the 1st of January until the 31st of December of 2018. Another rule was that I wouldn’t count the money until 2019 just to keep it a little more interesting.

A year flew by in a flash and here I am now full expectations for 2019. Now it was time to count the money and see how much I “made” in a year.

I sent the image above to a few friends and told them that the one closest to the correct amount would get chocolate from me :)

After I started counting I was a little shocked that I ended up with 461 bills for a total of 9220 Croatian kuna which is around $1400!!! I was expecting something like 4000-5000 kuna but this is far beyond what I expected.

My wife made a comment one day somewhere along the lines of “If you don’t spend these bills you are just spending other” which is true but this basically goes for any kind of saving. You put some money away and spend other money.

Anyway, I’ll use some of the money to buy stuff for our baby we expect to be born in late February or early March and the rest will just sit in the bank, waiting to be spent :)

I still have to go to the bank and give them this huge chunk of money and ask them to count it again and put it into my account. This is going to be fun :D

I have already started to save for next year and I don’t see any reason why you wouldn’t too.

Until next time. Keep doing fun stuff!