Find a penny, pick it up...

Here's a tip for all the runners out there. If you get up early to run, plan a route that makes you go past a few of the local pubs. More often than not you can find money dropped on the floor. Best find ever was a £20 note - but often find lots of smaller coins!! It's a good incentive to get out of bed and run!

When i was little i had a brittania savings account, my nan also opened one and they gave us a blue china pig (i have no idea why they gave a 65 year old lady a pig!). After a week or two my nan got fed up and smashed the pig with a hammer.

That made me laugh. I used to work for the Britannia building society, before my dd was born. When I was there it was just before they got rid of 1/2 pence pieces The building society, in its "wisdom" had decided to give all children a piggy bank (plastic, not china!) but NO KEY!!!! So on Saturday mornings, there would be a succession of small children with their piggies, and we had to unlock the base, count out all the pennies and half pences etc with an impatient queue of other customers waiting behind!

Loadsabob wrote:

It's quite usual around here to leave things in the alleyway if you don't want them. I put out a bedside table and chest of drawers that I no longer needed - just white melamine, that I'd painted the fronts of and added new handles. They were gone withint the hour, and it was lovely to think someone would be getting use out of them for a bit longer.

I found a gorgeous mirror at the side of the road on the way home from the pub. It's a subtle flower shape, backed with really heavy solid wood, no tarnish, and a chain to hang it. I love it, though I still haven't put it up. But people joke about it and suggest someone had just put it out to dry when I swiped it. As IF! There are often bargains for the taking! I love it when people are having decking done and they put the offcuts out. Just a few bits of nice wood like that from time time to time come in handy around the garden.

I knew that I wasn't the only one to 'street glean'! - I think that this abundance thing is self perpetuating......I'll explain....on Friday I encountered the reduced bog-off bonus, the one where you have 2 items that are bog-off marked down by half, the till charges you the reduced price, in this case 99 pence down from 1.99 so for the 2 items it was 1.98 and then because it's bog-off it takes the original cost of the goods off the total, so that was 1.99 off, so in effect I got 2 packs of free ham and they paid me a penny to take it away (I bought other things as well so I wasn't in credit by 1 penny, I couldn't have actually stood there waiting to get a penny given to me!).

So that was on Friday, on Saturday came the free wicker rocking chair (previous post on this thread) and whilst my family and I were still amazed by all these freebies it happened again yesterday.

OH and I were selling at a car boot sale, the man in the van next to us was selling soap powder etc and as we were packing up he came over with over 30 bottles of brown shoe polish and said that he didn't want them and would we take them from him? so we did, it wasn't worth thinking about it, we just said yes thank you. I will be giving them to all the local charity shops so the shops will get 50 pence or a pound or so for each and the customers will get a bargain......so it goes around
The way I see it is, he had obviously got fed up with trying to sell them and decided to get shot of them, we were handy so it made him feel good to have given them away, if we had been polite and said no he could have dumped them in the bin that was only 10 feet away. If he had done this, the circle would have been broken and the generosity to the charity shops would have been lost.
I read an article by an American author who was explaining how if you give generously and offer kindnesses it all comes back to you, not in the way that you might expect but in other random ways, and I think that we benefitted from this over these last few days. He also said that if you see a coin in the street you should pick it up because if you don't you are in effect snubbing the generosity that's been put in front of you and you won't be offered any more. I took all of this with a pinch of salt at the time I read it but now I'm beginning to think that there is something in this natural law of abundance.......

I always pick up pennies too - and other coins - as my mum always told me it was good luck. Best ever was on holiday in Bournemouth once, when I found three £1 coins lying together on the pavement. My husband got out of his car once and stepped onto a £20 note in the gutter.

Apprentice Tycoon, I'm also a great believer in what goes around comes around. My favourite is to pass on a car park ticket if it has unexpired time on it. Did this at Kew Gardens yesterday - you pay £3.50 for the whole day, so it seemed silly not to pass it on. The man's face was a picture - I think he thought it was a con until the ticket was in his hand! Hopefully he will then go on to do something nice for someone else and so on...

When I take my 8yo for her swimming lesson she likes to peruse the empty lockers. They cost 20p ea but the coin mechanism returns your 20p when you reinsert they key - only most people forget;) She came home £1.40 richer. Budding MSE'r or what?:D