Hogging The Piggy Bank

A few years ago as a joke, my kid brother gave me a piggy bank for my birthday. I’ve never been good about saving money, and although we don’t lead an extravagant lifestyle, I always seem to be cutting it close when it comes to cash on hand.

It actually comes in handy, as I deposit all my loose change in there whenever I come home from work. I literally do it unconsciously, and it keeps my drawer from getting cluttered with all that coin.

Lately, however, I’ve really considered the accumulation of money in there to be my emergency play fund should the need arise. I know, you’d think that someone like me would have a better contingency plan, but with the cost of everything these days – gas, electricity and education – “play” money is hard to come by.

What I didn’t know was that my wife had the same idea and was depositing all her coins whenever she changed purses or after she goes to the grocery store. My periodic checks of it via vigorous shaking revealed I had accumulated quite a bit of change. Of course, this is because I didn’t know about my wife’s contributions. Then one day I saw her making a deposit into “Porky.”

The other weekend, I was invited to go out drinking with the “boys.” That can get costly depending on where we go, so I decided to cash in my rainy day funds. I took Porky to Foodland and used one of those coin-counting machines. That evening as I went out the door, my wife told me to stay safe and not to spend too much money.

Little did she know I had a newly procured wad of cash in my pocket. The next day I heard her shriek from the bedroom, “Who took my emergency shoe money? I’ve been saving it up to buy a pair of shoes that just went on sale!” I didn’t want to admit what I absconded the funds for, so I told her, “Honey, I’ll buy those shoes for you.”

That seemed to distract her from the crime scene. As we got ready to go purchase the shoes, I hit up our 14-year-old daughter, “Uh, baby, Daddy needs to borrow some of that money Nana gave you at Christmas.”