It’s a constant struggle of living in a capitalist society: sometimes we feel we have too much stuff, and my other times, not enough.

In tandem, we seem to rarely ever feel both ways about money. I don’t think I’ve ever felt I had a surplus of that stuff.

However, every now and then, I do find myself with a bit of extra change lying around, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.

While I like to empty out my wallet of those ever-cumbersome coins, I like to hoard my hard-earned but easily spent change in a mason jar with a slice in its lid.

It serves me better in there than in the 25-cent candy machines at work, that’s for sure.

I’d advise people who don’t care for carrying their change around to get back to their old-fashioned piggy bank roots and see how quickly that spare silver can add up.

Once you’ve filled up your jar, maybe you’ll even decide that since you didn’t miss toting around the money when it was in your possession, you could drop it in the donation jar at a local business for one of a slew of charities.

Or maybe you’d like to roll up those coins, take them to the bank and exchange them for a cheque of equal value addressed to your favourite charity. There is no shortage of causes, both local and further flung, that could benefit from donations of any size.

If you’re not in the business of giving your money away, perhaps you’re in the market to make more of it.

Enter yard sales.

If you’re like me, you feel overwhelmed when you actually look at everything you own. Nothing reminds you of how much stuff you have like packing it all up and moving house.

So go ahead, gather up some of that unused stuff and slap some price tags on it, and get planning for a yard sale.

However, if you don’t have enough stuff for an entire yard sale — or if you don’t have a yard to sell in — you can always keep an eye out for the city’s community yard sales, which they do every so often, where you can rent a table for $5 and set up shop for a morning at the Civic Centre.

You could also get together with neighbours or buddies also looking to make the great household item purge and band together to make your wares now made available to the masses.

If you’ve got an item that has run its course, you could always try to recycle or repurpose it. At the last community yard sale, I met a woman who planned to turn a blanket into a sweater.

The citizens of McAllen, Texas — a city of about 136,000 near the border with Mexico — repurposed something on a much grander scale in 2011.

When the town’s Walmart store moved to a larger building down the street, the city bought the old structure and spent over $20 million fixing it up and turning it into a massive 123,000-square-foot public library.

Oh, and having so much floor space can hold more than the library’s collection of 356,000 items: it also boasts 16 public meeting spaces, 14 study rooms, and well over 100 computers for members of the public to use.

The library in Ithica, N.Y. had a similar revival from an abandoned Woolworths department store in 2000.

A former elementary school in Kansas City that closed down due to declining enrolment was sold for the purpose of being renovated into a 44-unit seniors residence in 2013.

Here in Merritt, a new tenant has recently taken up residence in the formerly vacant Coquihalla Middle School building.

With the infrastructure already in place to serve many different groups of people and families at the same time, it seems to be a great fit for Interior Community Services and other service agencies which offer programs to Nicola Valley residents.

It’s also a perfect way to discourage the building from being vandalized or falling into disrepair, and it certainly brings some new life to the former school.