Do you stop to pick up a penny or do you only stoop down for a £1?
On average we pocket £4 a year from picking up pennies from the street according to research by leading independent personal finance website Fool.co.uk.
Now, that may not sound like much, but across Britain, this equates to a potential £186 million a year!
That is a lot of loose cash and we respond to it in different ways:
- The average person picks up £3.80 of lost loose change in a year
- 7 out of 10 of us will keep paper money if we find it in the street
- 1 in 5 of us will hand it in
- 1 in 50 of us each year find over £50
Nearly 60% of us will pick up a lonely penny lying on the street; but not all of us are that cheap! 9% of us feel our effort has to be rewarded by at least 10p, and 7% of us simply won't go out of our way for anything less than £1.
- Men have (almost) all the luck
Men on average pick up more lost pennies than women. The man on the street scoops up £3.88 a year off the streets, but women only manage £3.35.
However, women are less likely to keep their haul; 35% will donate any notes they find to charity or hand them in to the police.
It appears that young people have fewer scruples about keeping what they find. 81% of 18- to 25-year-olds say they will keep any paper money they find.
Contrast this with 55% of people aged over 58 years of age who will keep it. But the over fifties are more likely to pick up coppers; 4 out of 10 say they will do so.
Londoners have the clearest idea of what their effort is worth. Less than half (41%) will bother to stoop to pick up a lucky penny.
However, 70% of their contemporaries in Yorkshire and Humberside will embrace that extra little coin.
6% of people in Northern Ireland won't get their hands dirty for less than £1, but prove to be most honest when finding notes; 25% will do their best to get £5 or more back to its rightful owner.
But 76% of Londoners and residents in the North East confess that they will keep what they find.
The most common place to find cash is on the pavements, but 8% of us will brave the fluff and dropped sweets down the back of our sofas to see if there be buried treasure!
1 in 10 of us always also check the change slot in vending machines and payphones (well, you never know what you might find) and 1% find that locations around parking meters are lucrative penny-picking areas.
David Kuo, Head of Personal Finance at Fool.co.uk, commented on their findings:
"It's quite extraordinary that people chuck away £186 million a year through carelessness. But it seems that one man's loss can be another man's gain.
"Now, no one can prove whether finding a penny and picking it up will bring you good luck. But there are better ways of making £3.80 than combing the streets for a year.
"By cutting out a store-bought sandwich at lunch and replacing it with a home-made one, you could easily pocket an extra £3.80 every day. And the money would grow to £1,429 in one year if deposited in a high-interest savings account paying 6%."
© Fool.co.uk 2008
How much would make you happy?