Money Miser

We have a large coin jar where we put all of our random change. It was getting pretty full, so I decided it was time to roll coins. Now, I could have saved myself some time and taken the coins to the automated machine at our local grocery store, and paid about 12% for the convenience. Instead, I decided to buy an inexpensive coin sorter and some rolls and do it myself.

The Money Miser box stated that it could handle up to 10 coins at one time. All you had to do was put the rolls in the slits, put in batteries, drop in some coins and voila! 

Yeah, right.

After maybe 5 quarters, the rest will get stuck at the dime slot. After spending about 15 minutes getting thoe unstuck, I then noticed that dimer were skipping their own slot in favor of the penny slot, and the pennies were dropping in on the nickles. Wasn't the whole purpose to segregate my coins??

After spending about 3 hours rolling maybe $30 in coins (ok, maybe 30 minutes actually rolling coins and 2.5 hours trying to get stuck quarters unstuck), the motor started to slow down. The batteries were brand new, so that wasn't the problem. The cheap motor simply can't handle spinning the cheap plastic coin spinner for more than a minute or two at a time.

But, what should I have really expected for just $15? I still use the Money Miser, I just don't turn it on...instead I drop the coins directly into the rolls and use the Miser's coin roll measuring bar to know when a roll is full. So, it wasn't a totaly waste of money (hence the score of 2)...but close.