Now, I’m NOT selling this as a get rich scheme, or even telling you, you should live like this. I’m writing this, to show you just HOW your pennies can actually ADD UP!

Ever wonder about those stories you hear about “homeless people” who actually HAVE huge amounts of cash and still CHOOSE to live on the streets.

A few years back I was sitting at a bus stop in the city where I lived and had a VERY long and interesting conversation with one of them. We're going to call him Mr. Smith, for privacy purposes.

I'd seen Mr. Smith many times over the years, pushing a grocery cart around the city, or just walking with a plastic grocery bag in his hand. Now, like you, I assumed he was either down on his luck and had no way to find a place to live or just drank all the time. Stereotypical of me.

The reality? He rents a room from someone VERY CHEAP. He is WELL educated with several degrees, VERY sober, and quite WEALTHY! While Mr. Smith was, at one time, VERY down on his luck, and HAD to live on the streets, this is no longer the case! The day I spoke with him, he could have purchased ANY house he wanted IN CASH!

How? As odd as it seems, our TRASH makes him LOTS of money. It's TRUE!

These days, most cities have a recycling program. The one where I lived, we got big blue BINS with a recycling logo on them and we put our recycling in OUR area every Tuesday night in the alleyways behind the houses. Other areas of the city had other recycling nights. I was an avid recycler, and always put out my own recycling each week.

Each Tuesday, Mr. Smith would walk through those alleys late at night and carefully remove all the items that WE are throwing away and SHOULD NOT! On Average Mr. Smith told me the residents of the city that HE visited, threw away over $1,000 per recycling night. And that’s just the ones HE visited personally. YES, we were being “environmentally conscious”. NO we were not being “PENNY WISE”.

Soda cans & Bottles ARE recyclable, so many people put them out on recycling night, but here in NY where Mr. Smith lives, they are also CASH. They are worth $.05 to us if we take the time to return them to the stores. To Mr. Smith, they are worth $.06 each! Simply because HE has the time to NOT ONLY return them, but to return them to a SPECIFIC bottle./can return center. To make $10 You or I would return 200 bottles/cans to the local store. Mr. Smith would only have to return 167. Mr. Smith averaged SEVERAL THOUSAND bottles/cans a week to this return center! All from TRASH people were disposing of.

The next thing he talked about were coupons. Now I use coupons. I get things free, or for pennies all the time. I THOUGHT I knew what I was doing. I spend $15 or so a week on 10 newspapers, so that I will have extra coupons for sales where I can get things for pennies or free. Mr. Smith, Spends ZERO and gets HUNDREDS of inserts each week! He simply uses the same recycling nights and picks up ALL the newspaper he sees. Convenient for him, we bundle the paper with string and separate it.

After collecting all his “goodies” for a night. He takes them all back to his “place” and spends the rest of the night counting. His bottles & cans go to the return center at the end of the week. He picks all the coupons out of the bundled piles of papers, and re-bundles what he will NOT use. The UNUSED paper goes into as separate pile. Every OTHER WEEK, he has a friend with a truck that takes him and those “unused” paper parts to the recycling center where they PAY HIM by the POUND to recycle them. He says he doesn’t get a lot for the paper, but it’s more than he had BEFORE.

Like the rest of us, Mr. Smith has FREE access to the computers at the library. Coupons he will NOT use go on Ebay (PayPal money gets moved into his bank account EACH DAY, he will go locate some bottles in the local trash cans for his postage to mail the coupons out), Coke Caps get redeemed at My Coke Rewards, Other soda caps at their various places, and so forth. FREE item coupons get redeemed and the items are put in the boarding house common area or kitchen where he lives for everyone to use.

He used to LOVE when McDonald’s used to put the Monopoly Game in the papers, recycling nights meant FREE food for WEEKS for almost everyone he knew. Now when McDonald’s does the monopoly thing, he goes in each day and asks for a free game tokens, at every McDonald’s in the area. He says he gets about 1 free meal a day, sometimes more.

It’s amazing what you can learn just sitting at a bus stop……. Think about the things you throw away, do you know someone else who could use those bottles you don’t feel like returning? Maybe a kid/teenager in the area? I’m not sure I’d have the space to store all the newspapers I buy till I got around to turning them in for cash, hopefully there’s a Mr. Smith in my area that’s making his pennies from them!