New York City on $2/day

This weekend in NYC, I planning on having a fun time; at least one nice dinner with jen_ashlock and Jason, and who knows what other good times. Jen and Jason have put themselves on a no-eating-out budget in the month of July, but I have a plan that will allow us to still have at least one nice meal out (maybe drinks too) without putting the slightly dent in their wallets.

It’s New York City on $2/day.

You don’t beleive this is possible, do you? Well…

I may have mentioned in some previous entry (which I am too lazy to go back and search for at the moment), that I never carry any change around with me. In fact, I hate carrying change. All of my change goes in two places: (1) either jars on a table in my kitchen, or (2) my desk drawer at work. This evening, I decided to count up the former. Here are the results, rounded to the nearest dollar:

One hundred and seventeen dollars is nothing to sneeze at. But here’s the really impressive part. I am not certain, but I believe that I probably have at least twice as much change in my desk drawer at work. Imagine one of those normal-sized, six-inch deep desk drawers. Now imagine said desk drawer filled roughly one quarter of the way with mostly-silver change. This will give you an idea of why I think my estimate is accurate.

I will be counting that change when I get into work in the morning, but assuming my guess is pretty close, that means a grand total of $350.00 to play with in New York City this weekend, and for the three of us, I think this could take us a long way. And it really is on $2/day or less, because I can’t imagine tossing more than $2 worth of change into the drawer each night. It simply accumulated over the last year.

There is one catch: Jen, Jason and I will have to haul all of this change into Commerce Bank and make use of their free “Penny Arcade” service, whereby you dump the change into a machine, it counts it for you and prints a receipt, which you take to the cashier to receive cash. I did this once before and received about $100. Now I’ll be trying for about $350.

Of course, I’ll post a followup tomorrow to let curious readers know just how much change I found in my desk drawer. Until then…