In this particular case, you're working with money, so you can avoid the whole BigDecimak issue by just storing the number of cents as an integer instead of the number of dollars as a decimal. To display the dollar value as a string use:
String value="$"+(cents/100)+"."+(cents%100);
Note that you'll also need to account for the special case when cents%100
is between 0 and 9, so you'll want to put this code inside a method. Let me know if you need more details.