Why I pick up pennies

My best friend Evan scoffed when I stopped to pick up a penny on the sidewalk. I scoffed right back:

“What? Do you want more money or not?”

Almost all of us would say we are motivated by money. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s very natural in our society. We need it to live.

Then why do so many pennies get left lying around?

It seems that sometimes we are not motivated by money, but we are always motivated by a lot of money.

Some people would say that pennies are insignificant, a nuisance, or inconvenient. Do you feel that way about other amounts of money?

If you found $100 on the ground, would that be too inconvenient to pick up? How about $20? $1? 25 cents? Ten cents?

Why is $100 or even $20 so much more motivating than one cent? They’re both legal tender.

We can all agree that $100 can buy us a lot more than a penny. If we were to find $100 on the ground, our imaginations would start to run about all the things we could get with that money. We would want to tell others about our good fortune so that they could imagine with us all the things that that money could become.

$100 is a lot more motivating than one cent because it is easier to imagine what $100 can become. $100 is motivating because of the many opportunities it represents, the various things it could become.

Money represents opportunity.

Money is motivating because of the opportunity it offers of becoming or providing something else. A penny also offers the potential for opportunity; it’s just harder to imagine.

A penny may not be able to increase your net worth significantly, but it can still move it in the right direction. If money is opportunity, then any increase in your net worth represents an expansion of the opportunity available to you.

Are you trying to get rich, or are you trying to increase your opportunities?

If your answer is the latter, any additional sum of money will do so. In building wealth, what’s more important is how the money is applied toward the creation of those opportunities after it’s in your possession.

“It’s not about how much money you have but how you treat the money you have.”

If we only appreciate large sums of money, we may have trouble with wealth building habits like saving and investing, for these are habits that employ the power of small sums of money over long periods of time.

If we can appreciate our money as a measure of opportunity instead of as a means of personal gain or self-aggrandizement, we will become better stewards of our money and, more importantly, feel wealthier in the present.

Appreciating our money for what it is instead of what it can become

When people ignore a free penny in the street, they are motivated by fear of loss.

Bending over to pick up the penny is not worth the loss of energy. Carrying or caring for the penny means one might lose the penny themselves: “Where do I put it? I’ll probably just forget about it in my pocket,” etc. “If others saw me excited about picking up a penny, they might think less of me…”

As the amount of money increases, however, we become motivated by gain. As I said earlier, we can more easily imagine what $100 can buy us, so we do not hesitate to pick it up and protect it.

Even though a penny is a small fraction of $100, it still offers opportunity. One cent may not be able to purchase a whole item, but it can contribute toward the cost, if only minimally. That means a penny can contribute towards the creation of opportunities just as $100 can.

The way you treat small sums will translate to how you treat larger sums. Large sums of money can buy big things or many smaller things. Small sums of money can buy small things or contribute to the purchase of big things.

With this perspective shift, we can appreciate not only large sums of money but also smaller sums. With this expanded appreciation comes more thoughtful spending, saving, and investing.

“What you appreciate appreciates”

When I stop to pick up a penny, I understand that it is not worth much. I even consider that it might fall out of my own pocket without me knowing it. I’m okay with that.

At least I practiced the habit of picking up the penny. It is one of my habits that makes me feel rich (“Free money, baby!”) and literally makes me richer (slightly).

I pick up pennies and am excited by them, not because of what they can buy me or because I’m desperately poor but because of what the act of picking up pennies represents. It is a habit that honors my respect for money and the opportunities that money can create.

It is a habit of wealth.

Picking up pennies is just one small example of a habit or a behavior that can make you richer and make you feel richer.

What are the activities and practices that make you feel rich?

How can you maximize those in your life?

Those are your habits of wealth.

Wealth is feeling rich. It is not a particular sum of money.

If you cannot feel rich with the means you have today, you probably won’t be able to feel rich with twice as much or even more.

In this sense, wealth is a practice (or a set of practices) that has very little to do with how much money you actually have.

“A penny saved is a penny earned”

Over time, with this habit of mine, I will accumulate whole dollars. The penny is small, but the habit is large.

By practicing habits that make us feel rich, we will practice the feeling of wealth with what we already have today. By cultivating habits that honor money and its opportunity, we can set ourselves up for literal and figurative enrichment — always moving in the right direction, one penny and one habit at a time.

Are you the type of person who picks up coins on the sidewalks or from the street gutter? It’s not embarrassing or demeaning.

Wouldn’t you rather be a dollar richer, even if it takes you many years to find that many pennies?

This is a personal finance article of Zeneration Wealth — a Gen Z-led platform encouraging our generation to discover how money can be used in service of our values, not in place of them.

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