Do you have some scrap metal laying around? How about soda cans or empty canned goods? All of these items are money waiting to be added to your fund. Just gather it up and take it to your local scrap yard. Check with your local scrapyard to see what the going rate is. Ours is currently paying $0.34 per pound of cans.
If you have multiple scrap yards in your area, be sure to call each one. They might compete with each other to bring you in more money.
Check out what SavEars had to say:
“I cashed in 3 garbage bags of cans yesterday and added $12.00 to our fund!!”
“We recently got a new stove and took the old one (it was 17 years old and not worth trying to resell) to the scrap metal place. Got $35 for it.”
Be sure to take the time to catch up on the Saving for Disney Challenge.
Not sure if this would work in our area, at least for household cans, as we have recycling and a bottle deposit. Then again, if I see what appears to be a clean empty returnable, I’ll pick it up and put it in the trunk to turn in. We refer to these as “dimes,” as Michigan’s bottle deposit is 10 cents. The money I get for these goes in our “found money” fund, along with the pennies (and sometimes bigger coins) we find along the way.
Just remember to be careful because theft of scrap metal (espically copper) is on the rise. Some areas are now requiring you get a permit to scrap because of it.
The previous owner of my house must have worked construction as there was a ton of rusted metal left on the property. Since I was afraid that a kid or one of the dogs was going to get hurt, I gathered it up to take it to the dump. Instead, I made several trips to a junk yard and made $210!!!! This definitely helped as I am still unemployed!
So funny this was posted b/c my husband recently started taking scrap metal from his job (he works for a construction company and had the ok) to sell. He’s made $98 for his “hunting fund.” Otherwise, all that metal would’ve just been thrown away!!
I cashed in 3 garbage bags of cans yesterday and added $12.00 to our cruise fund in 2 weeks!!
We recently got a new stove and took the old one (it was 17 years old and not worth trying to resell) to the scrap metal place. Got $35 for it.
My husband works for his friend who owns a scrap metal yard and I was surprised at what you can recycle for $$…I would call but you can pretty much take in anything that has a motor (old blenders, fans, old lawnmowers, ect.) Christmas lights, old cords (we all have those cords that we aren’t sure what they go too) So see what you have laying around that is taking up space and scrap it!
Wow, I wouldn’t have thought of Christmas lights or old cords..
Right now our local place only takes soda cans and scarlet metal, we don’t have any more metal right now… We only get like $2.50 for 3months of cans…. I wish they paid for paper and other stuff
I do this! Ours pays $.50/# for aluminum cans (bonus of an extra $.10/# if over 50#) and $.02/# for sorted newspaper, office paper and other paper. I don’t make a special trip just to go there, but do it when I’m already in town on an errand. I usually make anywhere from $7-10 each time I take it in. The key is make sure you call beforehand and find out how they want it sorted, b/c if it’s not sorted correctly, they won’t pay since they have to have someone there sort it. Also, check what they accept in each sort. For example, ours takes clean aluminum foil and cat food cans too, but others around town do not.
Good advice! :)
We recently started putting all our aluminum cans aside to take in to recycle versus putting them out at the curb. We crush all the soda cans and when we’ve filled up a black trash bag we’ll take them in to see how we do. A guy did come by our house and offered us $0.25 a pound, but I’m thinking somewhere has to pay that or more if he’s offering to give us that.