Bank will not accept loose change. Is this legal?
Is this even legal? How can a bank refuse to deposit legal tender in   the United States? Legal for all debts, public or private, doesn't mean quite what I used to think, either.  Per The Fed: This statute means that all United States money as identified above is   a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a   creditor. There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a   private business, a person, or an organization must accept currency or   coins as payment for goods or services. Private businesses are free to   develop their own policies on whether to accept cash unless there is a   state law which says otherwise. Yes, they can refuse loose change. Also, they aren't refusing your deposit, just requiring that it be rolled. What do I do with my change? I do not want to spend the time rolling   it, and I am not going to pay a fee to cash my change. There aren't many other options, change is a nuisance. I believe Coinstar machines reduce/remove their fee if you exchange coins for gift cards, so that might be the best option for convenience and retaining value. They cannot refuse to accept coins and demand some other payment after providing a good or service.  Legal tender is legal tender for all debts.  But until they provide the good or service, they don't have to accept it.   In this case, you want the service of depositing money.  But by its nature, they have to accept the payment first.  In that situation, they can refuse it.  There is no law that banks have to accept your deposits.  If they don't want you as a customer, that's their problem.   Consider switching banks.  Historically this was easier and some banks may still do things the old way.  Call your local banks and ask.  Perhaps you'll find someone happy to do business with you, on your terms.   As already said, some coin rolling machines will pay you with gift certificates.  If you plan to buy a sufficient amount from the place that accepts the gift certificate, this can get that place to play the fee.  That may help you, although it is obviously a limited solution.  The goal is to make it so that you only make purchases that you would have anyway.  The seller obviously has a different goal.   It's possible to buy coin sorters.  Heck, you could buy one with a gift certificate from a public machine.  Cheap ones require extra work to get the coins rolled and may jam a lot.  More expensive ones do more of the work for you.  Note that a given sorter that works better may be cheaper than another that doesn't work as well.  Cheap is more of a qualitative judgment than a financial measure in this case.   If you carry a small amount of change with you, pretty much everywhere accepts small amounts of change for purchases.  So if you have been always paying with dollars and dumping the change in a jar, instead always give the correct change (coins).  They may still give you dollars in change, but at least you won't get new coins.  And you'll use some of your existing coins.  Of course, this doesn't scale well.   For small purchases, say $1.50, you can often pay the whole thing in change without argument.  Or if something is $18.50, you might give them $10, $5, two $1 bills, and the rest in change.   If you are buying something and can see that they have little change in one of the coin buckets, offer to swap some change for bills.  Sometimes places find that easier than breaking a roll.   With vending machines, use change instead of dollar bills.  Especially use exact change so as not to convert bills to change.  They usually don't take pennies, but they're great with nickels and above.   This won't allow you to use change as a way to force yourself to save.  But it will keep your change down to a manageable level going forward.  And you might be able to use up your existing store.  I'm assuming that this isn't a fifty year coin collection that you are just now starting to process.  But if you have six months of change, you should be able to use it up in a year or so.   I tend to do this.  So I rarely have more than a couple dollars in change.  No one ever tells me that they don't take change, because I don't give anyone a lot.  Maybe $.99 here but more likely $.43 there.  Sometimes I give them, e.g., $.07 so as to get $.25 in change rather than $.18.   It's a little more work at every transaction, but it saves the big clump of work of rolling the coins.  And you don't have to buy wrappers. The bank certainly doesn't have to take it for a deposit; that's not a debt.  There have been several cases where disgruntled debtors have attempted deliberately annoying ways to pay their debts; the apocryphal example being pennies.  Courts are not likely to support such efforts since it's obvious that a) the action is malicious and (relevant to you) b) it's really on you to maintain your money in a wieldy form.  If you allow your money to become unwieldy, nobody owes you anything.   I wonder about the meta-meaning of that.  And whether, in that light it really makes sense to worry about 5% or rolling.  As far as getting rid of it, when I bought out a girlfriend's piggybank at par, I just made sure to walk out of the house with $5 in change in my pocket and unload $2-3 at every retailer, none ever objected and some appreciated.  Quarters were traded to coin laundry users. When going on transit I brought a bunch, the machines never grumbled.  I burned through the cache much faster than expected.
Because it makes money for all parties, and because the general public is reluctant to any change. Who should have an interest to change that? People. And they have no say in it. You can actually do a lot without paper checks nowadays (I only use one per year for car taxes, as they do not accept anything else), but many people shake their heads about even online banking and would never trust it. "All the other answers here are correct, but I'll add one more perspective. I am a business architect at one of the world's largest retail banks. Every day I experience the frustration of trying to get large-scale corporate IT to do anything, so I feel that your question is just one facet of the wider question: ""why are banks so old and busted?"" While it's true that the cost of online, redundant, performant, secure data storage is significantly higher than you anticipate in the question, it should still be well within the capacity of a large enterprise. The true cost is the cost of change. Nothing at a bank is a green field development. Everything is a bolt-on to existing systems. Any change brings the risk that existing functionality will be affected, therefore vast schemes of regression testing (largely manually executed) spring up around even the most trivial developments. Costs scale exponentially with the number of platforms affected (often utterly distinct, decades-old, incompatible platforms that have arisen out of historical mergers and acquisitions). Only statutory, revenue-generating and critical maintenance change is approved. Any form of cost-cutting that increases risk is quickly extinguished. This is because when things go wrong, IT get blamed by their business colleagues. This is because the business colleagues in turn get blamed by the regulators, the media, the customers, and the public at large. Who doesn't cuss their bank when the ATM is unavailable? The bank's IT organization develops a kind of management sclerosis, risk averse in the extreme. Banks can't ship a beta version and patch it later. This ultra-low-innovation approach is a direct result of market and regulatory forces. If you were happy with a bank account that played fast and loose with your money the way Facebook plays with your data, then banking would be much cheaper, much more innovative, and much riskier. To get back to your specific question, some banks actually do offer a much longer back catalog of transactions for download (usually only a few key fields of each transaction though), and the ones that don't most likely don't see it as a revenue generating selling point, and it therefore falls above their innovation appetite." "Legally, a check just needs to have a certain list of things (be an instruction to one's bank to pay a specific amount of money to bearer or to a specific entity, have a date, have a signature, etc.) There are anecdotes around of a guy depositing a junk mail check and it accidentally qualifying as a real check (which he turned into a live show), or of writing a check on a door, cow, or ""the shirt off your back"". What kind of checks your bank will process is technically up to them. Generally, if you get your blank checks printed up by any reputable firm, they'll have similar information in similar places, as well as the MICR line (the account and routing number in magnetic ink on the bottom) to allow for bank to process the checks with automated equipment. As long as it's a standard size, has the MICR line, and has the information that a check needs, your bank is likely to be fine with it. So, there are some standards, but details like where exactly the name of the bank is, or what font is used, or the like, are up to whoever is printing the check. For details on what standards your bank requires in order to process your checks, you'd have to check with your bank directly. Though, it wouldn't surprise me if they just directed you to their preferred check printer provider, as they know that they accept their check format fine. Though as I said, any reputable check printer makes sure that they meet the standards to get processed by banks without trouble. Unless you're a business that's going to be writing a lot of checks and pay a lot of fees for the privilege, a bank is not likely to want to make exceptions for you for your own custom-printed octagonal checks written in ancient Vulcan." I would say that there is no real difference.  Asset management companies that is part of large banking groups usually seat in separate entities and operate independently from the rest of the bank. Assuming proper procedures (and regulators usually check that) are in place they will not share information with the rest of the bank and their assets are clearly segregated from the rest of the bank. They have the same fiduciary duties as an independent AM and are probably using the broker/dealer services of other banks as well as their parent. Reputation is a key issue for banks and conflict of interests are usually managed properly. Independence also comes and goes. The corporate history of Neuberger Berman is a good example. Neuberger Berman was once an independent asset manager. In 2003, it merged with Lehman Brothers, thus loosing its independence. When Lehman went bankrupt in 2008, NB did not join its parent company in bankruptcy and did not lose the assets of its clients. The company continued to operate until it was acquired by the management. Finally it is mostly a question of marketing and positioning. "I am assuming that there is some arbitrary law preventing ordinary people from investing... because I have never seen a guaranteed 6% ROI YOY in my entire life.  Talk about the 1% of the 1%... lucky bastards!  Banks are puplicly traded corporations... what's stopping an investment company from creating a ""fake"" bank that takes investments from regular people and invests those into the federal reserve?  Returning 5.99% per year to their shareholders?" I'm pretty sure, especially if he works for a bank, he wouldn't be allowed to give you that kind of thing. I know at Citi, where I work, you can't but we have a reputation of being real anal about this stuff. Makes sense if you know everything that goes on :) If you have more than 50% of a US bill, it carries the full value and your bank should accept it. (Stores, or banks you do not have an account with, may not.) If you have less than 50% of the bill, it is worth nothing. The best way is to either file a dispute (or threaten to) with their regulator. They do NOT need negative attention from a bank regulator, so it should get their attention if you show that you are aware of and willing to contact them. They take this extremely seriously.  You can figure out who the regulator is using this helpful page on the Office of Comptroller of Currency's (OCC) website. If the OCC itself regulates the bank you can file a dispute using this web page.