Save Your Coins to Boost your PayPal!! #PayPalCoinstar #cbias

I have become very familiar with PayPal since becoming a blogger and my PayPal account has become invaluable. Before blogging, I used PayPal a few times to buy things online, but never in the way that I use it now. With my PayPal account, I can pay fees, buy blogging tools, enter those awesome cash giveaways that I know you all LOVE!! One of my unexpected, but greatly loved, ways of using it is to get paid.

As a blogger, I have been offered opportunities to blog about companies or provide links on my blog and even offered guest posts for payment. The most accepted way of payment for these types of activities on my blog is definitely PayPal. In the first few months of blogging, the small amounts I was receiving was counterbalanced by the events I wanted to enter and the products I wanted to buy, but there came a time that I had funds in my account and my family could really use the money to buy groceries or household items.
This is when we started to explore other options of using the funds in my PayPal account.

Luckily, around that time Hubby and I noticed a new sign on the Coinstar kiosk in the front of the Brookshire’s where he works. What caught our eyes is the sign that said “PayPal now lives here”.

We were definitely intrigued, but we hadn’t really tried to use it. We did go online to PayPal and ordered a debit card and now we have access to the account instantly through the card.

Around the same time that we noticed the Coinstar kiosk, The Boy noticed it as well. We shop a LOT at Brookshire’s and spend a LOT of time near the checkout (where all of the employees love to talk to Hubby and The Boy) so it was natural that he would notice the flashing machine with coins on the front. There is a small keyboard on the front of the kiosk and The Boy has a new love of video games recently so this was like a big video game that could possibly give him “monies”. He asked us over and over if he could “play” the game and we told him that if he would start saving all of the coins he found around the house, then we would show him how it works.

That was just a couple of weeks ago.

The Boy started scouting for coins immediately. I actually haven’t seen him quite this determined to do something ever. It became a joke around the house that if Daddy sat a coin down, The Boy was right behind him to pick it up. Hubby actually likes to buy his sodas with coins so it was quite a task for him to let The Boy save up coins, but he resisted digging into the banks.

Surprisingly, I was given an opportunity to check out the Coinstar kiosk in a Brookshire’s location and add coins onto my PayPal account and then blog about it. I was so excited to have a chance to show The Boy how it all works and then share this experience with you all!!

The whole transaction was very easy. We chose the option “Add coins to PayPal account”, then typed in the email address associated with my PayPal account. Once the account was located, we fed all the coins into the hopper and watched the balance go up!!

We couldn’t believe that The Boy had actually saved up $12.85!! The charge for adding coins to the PayPal account was only $0.81. The Boy picked up his receipt and was ready to do some shopping. Since we added the coin balance to the PayPal account, and we have the PayPal debit card, we just told him that his receipt was to remind him how much he could spend on his new toy.

We headed to Wal-Mart next and here’s what he picked:

This experience was so much fun for all three of us and the ease and convenience of the coin conversion was refreshing. Do you remember counting and rolling all those coins when you were younger? I remember that it was a long process!!

We didn’t run into any snags with our first use of the Coinstar kiosk, thankfully (4 year old=no patience) so I know we will be using this again. In fact, a couple of pennies were discarded in the kiosk and The Boy quickly grabbed them up and put them back in this tub to transfer into his banks. He’s ready to start saving again (whose boy is this, anyway?!!).

Learn more about Coinstar and Paypal:

Coinstar Facebook ♦ Coinstar Twitter

PayPal Facebook ♦ PayPal Twitter

To find out if there is a Coinstar near you and what services are offered, check out the Coinstar website in the top right. Once you find the location, it will tell you what all options are available.

The Coinstar at Brookshire’s #30 has these options: “ACCEPTS: PAPER MONEY, COINS – CONVERTS TO: PAYPAL, CHARITY, ECERTIFICATE”

Come check out more pics in my PayPal Coinstar Google Album.

Watch the video of The Boy’s experience on my Brand New YouTube Channel!!

I have been paid (at Coinstar’s request) to try and then blog about Coinstar’s products/services as part of a Collective Bias shopper insights study. All opinions are my own.