If you see a penny on the ground, what do you do? Do you pick it up or do you just walk on by? Me, I can’t walk past. No matter where I am, I always scoop it up. I don’t know exactly why I do it. I vaguely remember some self-help financial book that my parents had lying around that had ‘picking up loose change’ listed as a simple way to save money. It made lots of sense when I was a kid, and somehow the habit has always stuck with me.

And it is a habit that has rubbed off on Kim as well. Maybe it is that old phrase from Benjamin Franklin ‘A Penny Saved is a Penny Earned’ that has us scouring the ground for them, but more likely it is just the idea of a lucky penny. We aren’t overly superstitious, but anything that brings a little extra luck is OK in our book.

We’ve turned this little habit into a constant back and forth where we text each other when we find a stray penny. We find them in all sorts of places: the airport security line, under a shelf at the grocery store, and we even found some outside of a cathedral in Spain last year. If we aren’t together and we find one, we’ll send each other a picture to document our luck for the day.

I didn’t realize how often we find them, until I sent a picture of a penny to Kim yesterday morning and she responded with a compilation of pictures from the last week or two. Wow, I said to myself, that is a lot of lucky pennies. I don’t know that finding them changes anything about our lives, but it sure makes us feel pretty lucky. So, if you ever see me wandering, looking attentively at every nook and cranny on the sidewalk, you know I’m just hunting for a little good luck.