A PENNY SAVED IS A PENNY SPURNED.

Byline: PHIL ROSENTHAL 

Get rid of your piggy banks, kids. Make the tooth fairy pay you in crisp dollar bills. Spend whatever coins you get as soon as you get them.

Used to be a penny saved was a penny earned. Not anymore.

Seems they don't welcome change at my bank, and they're big and prosperous, so why should they? I'm just a small-timer. I have a modest checking account into which I deposit my paycheck, pay most of my bills and use the automatic teller machines more than I ought to.

It's tough saving money these days. But, ever since I was young, I have tried to put some aside whenever I can. Last week, when I realized I had filled a couple of shoe boxes with loose change - one for my pennies, the other for everything else - I lugged them into my bank for deposit.

But the bank didn't want my coins. Too much trouble.

Half the people I tell this to are shocked. Half respond as if I had learned Los Angeles is smoggy. They say this is neither a new phenomenon nor limited to my bank, and I should just buy one of those pricey gadgets that sort coins.

Both Ken, the bank teller, and Risa, the branch assistant vice president, acted as if I were trying to give them poker chips instead of legal U.S. money.

"They have machines in Vegas to count those, but we don't have them in our branches anymore - we haven't for years," Risa said. "We'll only take coins if you count them and roll them yourself first. But we'll give you the wrappers."

Great. Apparently, since they they sold us on the joys of using ATMs, they took a few things out of the branches we no longer visited. One of them was the clunky machine that counted coins.

"They were always breaking down," Risa said.

"Oh, golly, we've doing it little by little ... taking the machines out," said Louann, Risa's supervisor, reached later by phone. "It's a service we no longer provide."

On the other hand, if I wanted to pay for armored-car service, Risa and Louann said they could sort everything out at their downtown vault with a slight delay in crediting my account.

My mother, who serves on the board of a tiny bank in the small Midwestern town where I grew up, told me to bring my money home. Her bank counts coins for free, but she conceded it is part of a dwindling minority.

Fortunately, there's a firm out of Washington called Coinstar that has nearly 300 coin-counting machines at supermarkets in nine states, including the Hughes market near my home, with plans to expand to 1,000 sites by year's end. Coinstar's machines take the coins and issue cash vouchers. Last year, according to a company spokeswoman, it processed more than 800 tons in change.

I don't know what my coins weighed, but - as it turns out - 7,127 pennies, 1,357 quarters, 2,461 dimes, 1,731 nickels, 61 half-dollars and a Susan B. Anthony dollar are heavy.

Score one for thrift. That adds up to $775.67.

And that doesn't count my five Canadian coins, two car-wash tokens and a penny smashed into a Universal Studios "Back to the Future" souvenir.

The Coinstar machine at Hughes charged me $40.72 to count the money - 10 percent of every dollar in pennies, 5 percent of the quarters, dimes and nickels - but at least the people at the store were nice. They were glad for the business.

The bottom line: That guy on the street asking for spare change is actually doing you a favor. A penny saved is more trouble than it's worth.