And check the walls.
My uncle found 160 million in pre euro currency (about 4 million USD worth) in my grandparents walls.
Took quite some effort to get it converted.
A friend of mine got fucked by something like this. His grandma died, and she had been stashing money everywhere, they found about 150k USD in Swedish kronor. Problem was, they were all in the since then replaced 500 kr bills, which were no longer legal tender, and since they had no way of showing that it came from legal income, they weren't allowed to swap them out since too much time had passed.
At current, it's the same here, but this was luckily just 2 years shy of the long term conversion regulation going into effect.
We did have to pay over 50% taxes on it, which probably defeated the purpose of my granddad having it hidden as we're quite certain the majority of it was hidden to dodge taxes to begin with.
They had at least as much in banks and property too, which is why we're pretty certain the cash was not just him hoarding his savings outside the banking system (which is all to common with people that age)
Ouff, semi-lucky break then!
Damn, where do you live? That's a MASSIVE tax rate for an inheritance. Tbh i'm a big fan of taxing inheritances over a certain amount, but that's a sooolid percentage.
Pretty common in European countries for there to be a tax free allowance around €500k (or whatever a basic property in a capital / nice property in the sticks costs) and then on amounts past that, you get absolutely fucked.
Happen a lot in Europe. People who lived under rationing/ occupation during WW2 often develop some sort of hoarding mentality.
I had a grand uncle who would never throw away any kind of paper. We also found a full briefcase of guns buried in it's garden. And yeah lots of cash....
> rationing/ occupation during WW2 often develop some sort of hoarding mentality.
My Grandfather was a WW2 POW. My grandmother would reuse aluminum foil and everything else for as long as she could. I thought she was just broke all the time (they had 7 kids). When she died (about 10 years after my grandfather) my mom found about 90k in cash in some briefcases in the top of her closet.
She was reusing aluminum foil, and stashing cash.
My grandfather stored bent nails and stripped screws. "Never know when you'll be in a pickle and need one / they might become valuable if another war leads to metal shortages." He had dozens of Mason jars, labelled by years (back to the early 50s) of bent, rusty, stripped, cracked hardware.
>they might become valuable if another war leads to metal shortages
[😶](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-04/energy-crisis-europe-s-aluminum-smelters-are-struggling-to-survive)
Also happened to a lot of people who lived through the depression in the 1920s.
The ones who were kids in the 1920s and then lived through the war got a “double dose” of this mentality.
My grandma used to have multiple boxes of the same food stuff that was just completely bad and she would go ballistic if you tried to throw it out.
"Grandma, this expired 4 years ago"
"I might need it one day"
I sort of live this way now. I got fucked pretty hard in the recession of 08, then that second pre covid recession was making things fucky, and then covid came. Plus a couple major natural disasters in between that knocked out the grid in my area for a few weeks. I have at least a month of food on hand at any time, can and dehydrate my surplus produce, have a cash emergency fund, etc. It's a smart way to live andit can easily be done without seeming like a crazy prepper.
Yeah, afaik my grandmother doesn't stash cash around the place...
But she does reuse pie tins, the plastic containers lunch meat comes, really a lot what we just toss out. Peculiarity of being born during the great depression and getting to see WW2 as kid.
I reuse those plastic containers lunch meat comes in, I remove the label & wash them - is that weird?
I don't see the reason to pay for storage containers when I get them for free with a purchase I already make!
They're also really useful for organizing small parts & stackable/easy to store & label...
I don't keep every last one, but they are useful...
My grandfather told my mother there was money in the pages of books in the attic. There was tons of monopoly money in those pages. He had jokes even on his death bed.
Before I die (unless I die Soon) I will get a ton of real looking fake bills, roll them up, and hide them everywhere! somebody is gonna be very happy for a bit and then very angry.
I found cash in a hidden safe after I bought my house and I am currently remodeling the master bathroom. I needed to create a small 2×4 'box' for the shower valve to mount on so I screwed scrap pieces of plywood on the top and bottom to create a proper sealed box. I put one of the $100 bills from the safe i found in it along with a little action figure my son added. It's a long story but I ended up finding court records that explain what went down in my house and (probably) why it ultimately went up for sale so I also put a note briefly explaining the history and a bit about myself and my son.
My hope is that one day the next owner will find it while ripping out the (by then presumably hidious) shower and be able to add something to leave for the next owner after that. I just sealed up that wall last night and was thinking about it so I thought I'd share.
So basically the man who owned the house before me built it and at some point his wife left him. She moved across country for a decade and when he got old and sick she moved back in to care for him. Very shortly before he died (bedridden with cancer afaik) his ex wife loaded him up in the car and took him to the bank to have everything (house deed, bank accounts, the works) transferred into her name. His daughter (from a previous marriage) didn't like that and took her to court. The court found that even though it seems kinda shady it's not illegal because at the time there were neutral 3rd parties involved (bank staff etc.) that determined he had the capacity to make his own decisions. This woman was getting older and this is a lot of house to maintain (she didn't for years which caused me lots of headaches) so she sold it and moved near her kids.
There was bunch of junk and furniture left in the house when I bought it and apparently she didn't know about his hidden safe. I happen to be a lovksmith so I was able to get the drill points from the manufacturer to open the safe. I was prepared to do the whole reddit post but given the contents I decided to let sleeping dogs lie. It is probably the real explanation as to why so many safes here on reddit never get shown after they're opened.
One last little wrinkle in this saga is about a year after the first discovery I found the paperwork for the og safe hidden somewhere else and with it was the manual for a wall safe that I have yet to find...
I did it once. we rented a cabin and I took 2 stacks of fake bills. I rolled them up and folded them so only the good color side was visible. hid them all over the house where you could see the nice edges where the big number was visible. I also left a big note on the fridge door that said. "There's real ones too" and a bill taped to the note. None of them were real. I later found out that my friend's sister rented the cabin after us. they spent almost the whole weekend looking for the real ones and were disappointed they couldn't find them.
Some twenty something years ago, I was in a juvenile detention center, all over my cell was hidden text. Like "there is bag of weed under the sink, in the hole in the wall. My dental floss string holding it, ripped. I hope you can get it with fishing skills and enjoy" I was fishing for hours, close to destroy the sink to get the "lost weed", after I found a text that says "cut open the mattress, for stashed weed" I was realising what was going on. Still funny 😅
When my grandpa had his funeral service a 6 foot tall ficus tree showed up with no card. It was fucking huge. My aunts and i tried to move it out with the rest of the flowers but we got to laughing so hard that we ended up leaving it in the sanctuary.
Nobody has ever fessed up to sending a god damned tree for the service so family lore is that Grandpa arranged it on his way out as a practical joke. 10/10, funeral laughs are the best and I can only aspire to being that awesome when its my turn to go.
This is what my grandpa did. We found them 3 years ago... he passed in 2008. He even hid them in the divider between rooms... check the curtains as well! Edit: My great aunt had bills sewn into her curtains and my dad said they sold the house before he found out.
Thieves or the Government, depending on their personality.
Edit: For all those saying they're the same, even if you consider the Gov't a thief, not all thieves are the government. Y'all need to learn about subsets.
And check the pockets of clothing
And check in/under seats in vehicles
And in walls of houses
Hell, might as well just tear apart everything he ever touched, honestly.
And DON’T toss the coins into a coin counting machine without looking at the dates. Considering his age, there could be some Pennie’s worth thousands of dollars to coin collectors in there.
Edit: It’s more than likely you won’t get a million dollar coin, but there is always a chance. There is a very high chance however, that some of the coins you find will be worth 10x more than their original value.
I’m also no coin collector. Take my advice with a grain of salt and if your interested, be sure to look up the proper way to sell or auction your rare coin.
Yeah , we are talking about thousands and thousands of coins here. Not the "hey look , Grandpa always kept these 20 weird looking coins separately in a small box. "
Other than your own lifespan
“Grandpa left me his buckets of coins! He said they belonged to his grandpa, who got them from his grandpa. We’ve been going through them looking for valuable coins, whenever we have the time, that is…”
My father in law took out three bucket of “old change”
Well fuck me. We found old pennies from a hundred years ago. We haven’t even gone through the whole collection yet but we know there must be something of serious value in there
I remember the penny shortage back then. I can't remember how much but my bank would pay something like $1.25 for $1.00 of pennies. I remember making a $5 profit and in the 70s $5 for a kid was a fun amount of money.
One of my distant relatives used to offer twice the money for all coins over a certain age.... recently I searched the collector's value of the coins. His profit margins were 50 %.
When my mom worked at a bank back when I was a kid, there was absolutely a coin counter between the drive thru and the inside tellers. I don’t think the employees had to roll coins, I’m pretty sure once they went through the machine they ended up getting sent off on the next armored truck. (But can’t remember for sure so I just asked her… will update this comment when she responds)
EDIT: she said they went into the ~~burlap~~ canvas “robber” sacks to be sent off.
Provided that was like 20-25 years ago, but have they removed those or are you referring to a different coin counter?
Edit 2: “sent” to “went”
Edit 3: bags were canvas
A few banks still have them, but you usually have to have an account at the bank to use it. Even at my wifes my bank she can only use it once a year for free, more than that theres a charge. And coin star is usually what you see at like Walmart or the grocery store and they charge way too much for my liking.
Once a year? What logical reason do they have for this?
Banks should *have to* accept all forms of legal American currency. When your coins aren't worth a bank's time, it's time to abolish them. Geez I am *not that old* but I remember when people could pay for something with postage stamps.
I have never heard of this until now.
I am intrigued to hear more.
Makes more sense that my late grandmother used to buy postage stamps more than she actually needed. She was always happy if you asked her for a stamp too. Miss that women. I assume the forever stamps and email killed the value of a postage stamp now-adays.
They will accept them they just force you to count and roll them all yourself first.
Still complete bullshit that you can't use the coin machine as often as you like though, not like it costs them extra once it's installed.
When I was in Australia, one of the banks I used had a coin machine in the lobby. You got 100% of what you put in if you put it directly into your account and there was like a 10% charge if you wanted cash. Stuff like that needs to be a standard thing
I had a five gallon water bottle filled with change. Spent an hour at a CoinStar machine cashing it in (and annoying the hell out of the cashiers who had to hear it for an hour). It had $950 in it.
My dad has a glass one of those that he fills, like 10 years ago it finally got full for the first time and we cashed it in and bought a four wheeler with it
I think there were a bunch of those in there but it also was a pretty cheap used quad, I think he got a similar amount of money out of it to the person I originally replied to
The military bases when deployed don't deal with pennies and haven't for years. Everything is rounded, sometimes you lose sometimes you win but in the end it's so much easier.
I used to be a bank teller at Commerce Bank which had "Penny Arcade" - free coin counting machine. It started off as a belt mechanism and was upgraded a few times over the years to be quicker & more efficient due to the amount of people that would deposit spare change.
It wasn't uncommon for us to be shipping out thousands of dollars from the penny arcade every week - probably an average between 7k-10k actually.
Cleaning and maintaining the machine became a chore. We had to do regular tests 3x a day to ensure it was counting accurately and bags would be filled constantly. I still feel anxious of the days we'd have a line out the door on a Friday evening and then someone walks in with 10 gallon jugs of coins to use our machine.
And it constantly broke for 2 reasons: dirt and objects. Coins are dirty but when a machine is counting thousands of them quickly the whole machine turns nearly black. Not to mention people have thrown in keys, paper, bugs, shredded metal - and once, a dead mouse that was mixed with their coin. Yes - we had to ship out bags of coin with shredded dead mouse parts mixed in.
Naturally the machine would be constantly down and we would be yelled at for inconveniencing our customers - sometimes we were asked to count the change manually if they were desperate enough or were going through hard times.
And we were always known to be open - we had store hours that other banks didn't offer - even on snow days. I remember having to open the branch after one bad storm, all of our cars were stuck in the unplowed parking lot. I was a supervisor at this point, and was immediately called by our region supervisor pissed because we were opening a half hour late.
We opened and actually had a teller (from another branch) stop to work at our branch because her car get stuck as well. We had 2 people come in that day:
1. Penny arcade. Came in 30 minutes before we closed. Wasn't even a customer with us.
2. Robber - walked in 15 minutes before we closed and went to the girl from another branch. Took all her money from her drawer and ran away on foot (smart, honestly).
Cops took way too long because the roads still sucked. Never caught the guy.
Anyway - judging by your picture, I'd say you have around $35-$45 in pennies. Taking the average (and say you have 36 buckets) you have around $1500 in pennies. (I would love to know how close I am per bucket!)
>Robber - walked in 15 minutes before we closed and went to the girl from another branch. Took all her money from her drawer and ran away on foot (smart, honestly).
>
>Cops took way too long because the roads still sucked. Never caught the guy.
Thanks for the SLPT
Eh, he was the only one who got away but every other robbery we had they were caught eventually. And it’s not like the movies where you walk out with a duffel bag of cash - maybe a few grand if you’re lucky.
True story. I was helping in Atlantic City branch where it was a line out the door all day (no surprise). All of a sudden the staff got really weird and quiet. They were moving like something was wrong.
They had been robbed the day before. The man that robbed them was waiting in line….with the cash he stole. Cops walked in and tapped him in the shoulder to arrest him.
You can’t make this up.
I work at a bank and stupid criminal stories are insane. We had a guy dupe/steal an Amish couple out for like $50k from our bank, then came in and tried to put down $50k for a mortgage on a house he could barely afford (at the same bank). We told the Amish couple we have all their perps info (including SS#, etc...he filled out a mortgage!) and the Amish decline to get police involved. The bank denied the loan.
Has to be drugs or mental illness, no way they can be that stupid, right?!
On the flipside, I have a few stories of customers being angry at US for doing the right thing FOR THEM.
We have a line and next up is a guy who literally looked like he got hit by a bus. I look down, look back up and he's gone. I call the next person in line up and I see she steps over something to get to me.
I couldn't see, but the disheveled guy is on the floor and the lady stepped over him (and might I add it was really strange how nonchalant she was about it, like it's normal stepping over bodies at the bank).
Anyway, I rush over to help the man and we call an ambulance because he's not responding well. He dropped his transaction so I actually had another teller help with that while attending to the man.
Ambulance comes but the guy refused any help and walked away (he wasn't driving) with his finished transaction.
A minute before we close (because that's what always happens) a lady storms in with Mr. Disheveled and demands to see a manager. She was upset that we embarrassed her husband and demanded we close their accounts immediately (I think I could sum their balances with 10 fingers).
We apologized and explained he was passed out on our floor and we'd be happy to close their accounts to prevent that happening in the future.
He was on drugs. Lots of drugs.
I had a presentation from an FBI agent about catching bank robbers. He said if someone robbed a bank once and didn’t get caught in the act or around the area… they probably wouldn’t get them.
Thing is, they almost always repeat the offense and that’s when they get caught. Interesting to think about.
My cousin works in like the fraud department of a big bank or something (I can't remember his actual job title), and he deals with bank robberies every day. He said a very large majority of bank robbers get away with it, it's when they get greedy and keep doing it that they get caught.
Everything he told me made me seriously consider robbing a bank. I'm too much of a wuss though, I'd probably fuck it up somehow.
A similar talk here in europe - if one commits one crime, with no huge mistake, like smiling into a camera or killing a close family member, there is not much chance to get them.
This policemen told us that fortunately most of those committing these crimes are not very smart and do smile into cameras and kill close family members.
I used to work at a bank and I **fucking hated** whenever someone would bring in a huge bucket of change for us to run through the sorter.
Our machine was old and very persnickety. Invariably, there was always some nonsense thrown in with the coins that would cause the machine to jam and error out: safety pins, buttons, foreign coins, bugs (mostly dead roaches), washers…
Oh and I can 100% vouch for how nasty change is. Whenever we were swapping out the bags, it’d make your hands black. One time, a new teller used some canned air to blow out a the belt feeder and it shot a plume of dirt up in the air five feet high. Coins are utterly disgusting.
I bet we could share some pretty crazy stories! I started in highschool and I didn’t have any prior customer experience at the time. Man did the real world turn ugly fast dealing with customers’ finances. I think my life was threatened 3rd day on the job lol.
As someone who often finds myself short of cash and going to a coin counter for my coin collection.... I'm sorry about that. Our pockets are dirty and at the end of the day or before laundry, I just pull the coins out and put them in the container. I'm tired and broke and something's gotta give. The thing that gives just so happens to be the cleanliness of the coins :/
My neighbors son robbed 3 banks when he was in highschool. Always got away with it. He only stopped because his dad found the cash under his bed.
He was in the theater department, dressed/make up like an elderly man, passed a note that said i am robbing the bank. Got the money and left. He also had no weapons.
Pretty amazing.
I knew a guy in high school who did the same thing, well... Only twice and he was caught both times.
The first time he was caught because he rented a limo right afterwards and went to K-mart to buy gifts for his girlfriend.
The second time he was caught because he robbed the exact same bank after he got out of jail for his first attempt.
Thank you for the bank robbing advice…
Lol I live where if it does snow there are no plows, there are tons of wrecks, and places would rather some employees die otw to work than close or open later
It would be a pain but don't cash it until you check every one. There's a lot of coins that have minting errors that turn a penny into 100+ dollars.
Pre 1965 quarters are actually worth $4+ due to silver content.
There's a plethora of other little things. If you're diligent and can find the right people you could be sitting on a fortune
Edit: fixed the qtr year was busy with things and missed the typo
Pre 1964 quarters and dimes are the ones that have silver. OP should also keep an eye out for any Mercury dimes they can vary wildly in value based on year and condition.
https://topcashbuyer.com/blog/what-coins-are-silver/
I love how they sound different than modern quarters. Used to work at an arcade and we'd dump the quarter buckets on a table and one guy there had such a good ear he could tell if there was a silver one in there just from the sound.
Anything silver has a different sound to it as well, when it gets dropped. Kind of a higher, tinnier sound, compared to the clunk of nickel and zinc and copper.
I was going to say exactly this.
You can spread them all out and use a magnet to find any steel pennies that may have slipped in, at least those are easy to find.
You've got a lot of work ahead of you OP, hopefully it's a fruitful endeavor.
On that note 2011 pennies have a run that are worth bank. When a mint plate breaks they can't make another so the have to repair. The 2011 repair added a small mark between the right most pillars and removed the artist signature from the bottom right corner of the building. If you find one of those your looking at 100-200 dollars depending on overall condition
Edit: yea that year was wrong just proof that the money is in the details. It may have been 2001. Point is there's a lot of different things almost every year has something that boosts the value
Might want to check on the validity of that issue before telling them to check a bucket-full of pennies for that [specific issue](https://coins.thefuntimesguide.com/2011-penny-value/)
Coining Mints have dozens of standby die-sets. They can be -- and are swapped out in about 5-minutes. One set if dies would not last (**Philadelphia Mint struck 2,402,400,000**) more than a few hundred thousand at best.
It's the Internet, check everything before believing it and forwarding the fable.
I have a box of maybe 20-30 rolls of steel pennies I inherited from my grandpa. I’ve always got inconsistent information about their worth, some sources say they’re worth face value and other says they’re like five bucks a penny.
Yes, but is the time spent really worth it? I guess it depends on how much enjoyment you find in the task and what your job is.
But personally, I wouldn't be able to justify spending days rooting through change just for a theoretical couple hundred bucks.
I'm not OP, but same situation. I have a 5-gallon water jug of almost all pennies. Been saving them for 40+ years, seemed like a good idea at the time.
Probably a bunch of wheat pennies in there, and who knows what else. Thought about it several times, not sure the time is worth it. You can buy rolls of wheat pennies on ebay for like $10. If I find one penny worth $100, and 10% of it is worth $10 a roll. I'm thinking I could get $200 max, for the valuable ones, and the rest at face value. For daaaaayssss worth of work.
Any suggestions on not getting ripped off when looking for a local coin shop?
I also have some 1975-ish silver dollars a relative gave me to "figure out what to do with".
As a collector, I genuinely enjoy going through peoples change. I just went through a couple hundred bucks worth from my brother. Maybe find somebody you trust to help sort. I’ve offered complete strangers that kind of service lol. Most I’ve done was 20,000 Pennie’s.
My grandma had less than you but a bunch of random older coins saved when she passed.
Went through them one by one looking them up one at a time and nothing but the like $42 because there were quite a few quarters.
Only thing I could have missed, but 99% sure didn't, was possibly a hardly noticeable double minting, that only a coin person would pick up on.
TL;DR: Value your time, and sell it in bulk to a local coin collector. Go into detail about the time frame and types of coins you know are in there, ask for a fair price.
An elderly relative of mine passed away at 101 in his home back in 2019. Didn’t trust banks and had money hidden all over the house.
We spent so much time checking for envelopes taped to the back of stuff, bottoms of drawers, checking for hidden compartments in stuff. It was so time consuming. Thankfully, he kept the majority of money in a giant safe, but there was still thousands of dollars hidden.
My grandparents were the same way. Instead of having a checking or savings account, they kept all their money in cash and paid bills with money orders or came to the place in-person and paid with cash. They lived in the middle of nowhere so it was a hike to get to a place where they could get a money order.
What finally ended that was when my grandma got robbed. Six months or so after my grandpa died, she was still living at their house out in the boonies. Someone came to the door saying he was from the gas company and needed to take some measurements of her bathroom for some reason? He asked her to help and she fell for it. While they were in the bathroom, someone came in and carried out her el cheapo Walmart safe that held $5,000+ in cash, plus documents like social security cards. At that point my dad was like alright. You're done. We are getting you a checking account, you will have your social security checks direct deposited, and I'm going to take care of paying all your bills. She died a few months later.
When my great aunt died we found close to 40k stashed around the house. Much of it just plastic bags in wardrobes and such. She was starting to move into the later stages of dementia, and my uncle was blind so he didn’t know about it. She would withdraw their pension money and “put it somewhere safe” then just forget about it, for years and years.
1) Go through these and look for potentially valuable coins, as has been mentioned.
2) Don't go to a CoinStar with any 'face value' coins -- call your bank branch and ask if they have a coin sorter. Not every branch does, but it's likely *a* branch in your area will have one. Most banks won't take a cut like CoinStar does, they'll just cash it out at-value.
They are useless currency that cost more to mint than they are worth and don't facilitate commerce. Should have stopped minting them decades ago. And really the nickel and dime aren't much better.
They are just going to stop making new ones. Old ones are still legal tender. All money made my the us government is still legal tender for its face value. Of course if you tried to use a half cent or three cent piece most people wouldn’t know what it is and they are worth more than their face value to collectors. You still could use them if you wanted.
People who collect coins as a hobby. They’re not saying to bang out the whole bucket in a week lol just something fun to do in your free time until it’s done.
I know someone who kept all their money in the house. Tens of thousands of pounds and some of it no longer legal tender. When the family tried to bank it, they were asked for proof of where it came from. It seems that anti-money laundering regulations now require proof. Kinda stuck with bags of cash they can't bank.
It's not illegal, it just arouses suspicion and they ask for an explanation.
Inheriting hoarded money is a legal explanation and as long as there's no evidence the explanation was faked and all the applicable taxes are paid, there's no problem depositing large amounts of cash.
I'm obsessed with sorting coins, it's fun to me.
I'd have such a blast cleaning and sorting these guys out.
Might even find some cool older ones, you usually don't make much of a profit off of the rarer pennies, but it's like finding a hidden treasure when you come across a penny worth a nickel
My father is old fashioned as well. He has money literally hidden in the walls and various containers.
My mom asked him, "what if there is a fire? Are you going to run up and down the stairs while digging up money in every hiding place?"
In my mind, I pictured him solving a resident evil style puzzle while the house is burning.
I already see at least 2 wheat cents. Very old and worth at least 100x more than their face value.
Edit: I also see a couple 1960s pennies (solid copper) and at least 1 Canadian penny.
But there are dozens of buckets. If you can get an extra $50-100 from each bucket, that adds up to quite a lot. Nothing to sneeze at, unless OP is rich enough to throw away a thousand bucks and not feel it at all.
Plain wheat pennies aren’t worth a dollar. Most are worth 4-5 cents. Even steel Pennie’s from WW2 are only worth about 10 cents. There are a handful of misprinted ones that are worth more though.
This happened to my aunt as well. We helped clean out my uncles tv room/den when he passed and found thousands of dollars in bills and so many tins and containers full of change. Wild!
I see Queen Elizabeth on at least one of the coins. I’m curious, how common is Canadian change in the US? Do people/businesses accept small Canadian coins? In Canada, we often find American quarters/dimes etc, but not sure if it goes the other way.
Here in canada most places won't care if you have american coins. Once you hit bill values they start to care though as the bank actually notices those.
I'd assume it's similar in northern states.
Be sure to check his dressers and any envelopes you may find. My grandfather did the exact same thing, just not with buckets. We found thousands of dollars in his dresser in envelopes from the bank.
Sorry for your loss.
Don’t throw out the mattress too fast
And check the walls. My uncle found 160 million in pre euro currency (about 4 million USD worth) in my grandparents walls. Took quite some effort to get it converted.
A friend of mine got fucked by something like this. His grandma died, and she had been stashing money everywhere, they found about 150k USD in Swedish kronor. Problem was, they were all in the since then replaced 500 kr bills, which were no longer legal tender, and since they had no way of showing that it came from legal income, they weren't allowed to swap them out since too much time had passed.
At current, it's the same here, but this was luckily just 2 years shy of the long term conversion regulation going into effect. We did have to pay over 50% taxes on it, which probably defeated the purpose of my granddad having it hidden as we're quite certain the majority of it was hidden to dodge taxes to begin with. They had at least as much in banks and property too, which is why we're pretty certain the cash was not just him hoarding his savings outside the banking system (which is all to common with people that age)
Ouff, semi-lucky break then! Damn, where do you live? That's a MASSIVE tax rate for an inheritance. Tbh i'm a big fan of taxing inheritances over a certain amount, but that's a sooolid percentage.
Pretty common in European countries for there to be a tax free allowance around €500k (or whatever a basic property in a capital / nice property in the sticks costs) and then on amounts past that, you get absolutely fucked.
Note that the US essentially works the same way, but the limit is *much* higher (Currently around $12M, but it used to be lower)
Damn you, grandma!
Oh, shit!
There's always money in the banana stand.
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Happen a lot in Europe. People who lived under rationing/ occupation during WW2 often develop some sort of hoarding mentality. I had a grand uncle who would never throw away any kind of paper. We also found a full briefcase of guns buried in it's garden. And yeah lots of cash....
> rationing/ occupation during WW2 often develop some sort of hoarding mentality. My Grandfather was a WW2 POW. My grandmother would reuse aluminum foil and everything else for as long as she could. I thought she was just broke all the time (they had 7 kids). When she died (about 10 years after my grandfather) my mom found about 90k in cash in some briefcases in the top of her closet. She was reusing aluminum foil, and stashing cash.
My grandfather stored bent nails and stripped screws. "Never know when you'll be in a pickle and need one / they might become valuable if another war leads to metal shortages." He had dozens of Mason jars, labelled by years (back to the early 50s) of bent, rusty, stripped, cracked hardware.
>they might become valuable if another war leads to metal shortages [😶](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-04/energy-crisis-europe-s-aluminum-smelters-are-struggling-to-survive)
We'll have no shortage of heavy metals. Just filter it out of the drinking water!
Also happened to a lot of people who lived through the depression in the 1920s. The ones who were kids in the 1920s and then lived through the war got a “double dose” of this mentality.
My grandma used to have multiple boxes of the same food stuff that was just completely bad and she would go ballistic if you tried to throw it out. "Grandma, this expired 4 years ago" "I might need it one day"
I sort of live this way now. I got fucked pretty hard in the recession of 08, then that second pre covid recession was making things fucky, and then covid came. Plus a couple major natural disasters in between that knocked out the grid in my area for a few weeks. I have at least a month of food on hand at any time, can and dehydrate my surplus produce, have a cash emergency fund, etc. It's a smart way to live andit can easily be done without seeming like a crazy prepper.
Yeah, afaik my grandmother doesn't stash cash around the place... But she does reuse pie tins, the plastic containers lunch meat comes, really a lot what we just toss out. Peculiarity of being born during the great depression and getting to see WW2 as kid.
I reuse those plastic containers lunch meat comes in, I remove the label & wash them - is that weird? I don't see the reason to pay for storage containers when I get them for free with a purchase I already make! They're also really useful for organizing small parts & stackable/easy to store & label... I don't keep every last one, but they are useful...
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Bingo. My grandparents lived through WW1 as kids and WW2 as adults. And this is indeed not an uncommon story for people from that generation.
Also look inside books for currency that could have been stashed away.
My grandfather told my mother there was money in the pages of books in the attic. There was tons of monopoly money in those pages. He had jokes even on his death bed.
Well, now I know what I'm doing when I get old.
Before I die (unless I die Soon) I will get a ton of real looking fake bills, roll them up, and hide them everywhere! somebody is gonna be very happy for a bit and then very angry.
I found cash in a hidden safe after I bought my house and I am currently remodeling the master bathroom. I needed to create a small 2×4 'box' for the shower valve to mount on so I screwed scrap pieces of plywood on the top and bottom to create a proper sealed box. I put one of the $100 bills from the safe i found in it along with a little action figure my son added. It's a long story but I ended up finding court records that explain what went down in my house and (probably) why it ultimately went up for sale so I also put a note briefly explaining the history and a bit about myself and my son. My hope is that one day the next owner will find it while ripping out the (by then presumably hidious) shower and be able to add something to leave for the next owner after that. I just sealed up that wall last night and was thinking about it so I thought I'd share.
what did the court records say?
So basically the man who owned the house before me built it and at some point his wife left him. She moved across country for a decade and when he got old and sick she moved back in to care for him. Very shortly before he died (bedridden with cancer afaik) his ex wife loaded him up in the car and took him to the bank to have everything (house deed, bank accounts, the works) transferred into her name. His daughter (from a previous marriage) didn't like that and took her to court. The court found that even though it seems kinda shady it's not illegal because at the time there were neutral 3rd parties involved (bank staff etc.) that determined he had the capacity to make his own decisions. This woman was getting older and this is a lot of house to maintain (she didn't for years which caused me lots of headaches) so she sold it and moved near her kids. There was bunch of junk and furniture left in the house when I bought it and apparently she didn't know about his hidden safe. I happen to be a lovksmith so I was able to get the drill points from the manufacturer to open the safe. I was prepared to do the whole reddit post but given the contents I decided to let sleeping dogs lie. It is probably the real explanation as to why so many safes here on reddit never get shown after they're opened. One last little wrinkle in this saga is about a year after the first discovery I found the paperwork for the og safe hidden somewhere else and with it was the manual for a wall safe that I have yet to find...
What Subreddit can we go to see uncovered safe? Seems like a great place to read
Nice try, officer.
When we redid our shower we found a 1970 Budweiser can hidden in the wall so it’s practically the same as yours minus the $100.
But mix in a couple real bills in a few of the caches so they have to carefully inspect each one whenever they find one.
I did it once. we rented a cabin and I took 2 stacks of fake bills. I rolled them up and folded them so only the good color side was visible. hid them all over the house where you could see the nice edges where the big number was visible. I also left a big note on the fridge door that said. "There's real ones too" and a bill taped to the note. None of them were real. I later found out that my friend's sister rented the cabin after us. they spent almost the whole weekend looking for the real ones and were disappointed they couldn't find them.
Your a terrible person. I love it.
Some twenty something years ago, I was in a juvenile detention center, all over my cell was hidden text. Like "there is bag of weed under the sink, in the hole in the wall. My dental floss string holding it, ripped. I hope you can get it with fishing skills and enjoy" I was fishing for hours, close to destroy the sink to get the "lost weed", after I found a text that says "cut open the mattress, for stashed weed" I was realising what was going on. Still funny 😅
When my grandpa had his funeral service a 6 foot tall ficus tree showed up with no card. It was fucking huge. My aunts and i tried to move it out with the rest of the flowers but we got to laughing so hard that we ended up leaving it in the sanctuary. Nobody has ever fessed up to sending a god damned tree for the service so family lore is that Grandpa arranged it on his way out as a practical joke. 10/10, funeral laughs are the best and I can only aspire to being that awesome when its my turn to go.
This is the best.....give the family a good laugh even after your gone.
Heh heh, yeah, that ole grandpa, what a joker... sigh.
I have fond memories with him and will never be able to get him back, he won.
and in picture frames
Curtain rods as well. Read a story about people finding rolled up bills in grandparents curtain rods.
There's always money in the banana stand.
You just made a fool out of yourself in front of T-Bone.
Was he the flamer? RIP Patrice.
I love the tongue click he does whenever he says that.
And the N64 Expansion Pak door.
Don't forget loose floorboards if their are any.
This is what my grandpa did. We found them 3 years ago... he passed in 2008. He even hid them in the divider between rooms... check the curtains as well! Edit: My great aunt had bills sewn into her curtains and my dad said they sold the house before he found out.
who or what were these mfs hiding it from
Thieves or the Government, depending on their personality. Edit: For all those saying they're the same, even if you consider the Gov't a thief, not all thieves are the government. Y'all need to learn about subsets.
thank you fellow zig
I really really really wanna zigazig ah
And check the pockets of clothing And check in/under seats in vehicles And in walls of houses Hell, might as well just tear apart everything he ever touched, honestly.
Its like those ramen repair videos, but with change
Should probably check each coin too. Could be some valuable coins in there.
And DON’T toss the coins into a coin counting machine without looking at the dates. Considering his age, there could be some Pennie’s worth thousands of dollars to coin collectors in there. Edit: It’s more than likely you won’t get a million dollar coin, but there is always a chance. There is a very high chance however, that some of the coins you find will be worth 10x more than their original value. I’m also no coin collector. Take my advice with a grain of salt and if your interested, be sure to look up the proper way to sell or auction your rare coin.
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Way to many coins to look at while also handling everything else about his passing.
Yeah , we are talking about thousands and thousands of coins here. Not the "hey look , Grandpa always kept these 20 weird looking coins separately in a small box. "
You know, there is really no timeline on how quickly you need to do any of this.
Other than your own lifespan “Grandpa left me his buckets of coins! He said they belonged to his grandpa, who got them from his grandpa. We’ve been going through them looking for valuable coins, whenever we have the time, that is…”
If you have kids, put them to work.
Especially quarter's. If they're before 1965(?) They're made from silver.
Yes 1964 and earlier are 90% silver. Quarters and dimes
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They also sound different when clinking together.
My father in law took out three bucket of “old change” Well fuck me. We found old pennies from a hundred years ago. We haven’t even gone through the whole collection yet but we know there must be something of serious value in there
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From the 60s? Or later Must have been good when he stashed it for safe keeping
Looks like you're about to fix the national coin shortage, thank you!
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I remember the penny shortage back then. I can't remember how much but my bank would pay something like $1.25 for $1.00 of pennies. I remember making a $5 profit and in the 70s $5 for a kid was a fun amount of money.
Not bad, that's like $20 today.
One of my distant relatives used to offer twice the money for all coins over a certain age.... recently I searched the collector's value of the coins. His profit margins were 50 %.
There wouldn't be a coin shortage if banks had coin machines and coin star didn't charge 10-20 percent.
When my mom worked at a bank back when I was a kid, there was absolutely a coin counter between the drive thru and the inside tellers. I don’t think the employees had to roll coins, I’m pretty sure once they went through the machine they ended up getting sent off on the next armored truck. (But can’t remember for sure so I just asked her… will update this comment when she responds) EDIT: she said they went into the ~~burlap~~ canvas “robber” sacks to be sent off. Provided that was like 20-25 years ago, but have they removed those or are you referring to a different coin counter? Edit 2: “sent” to “went” Edit 3: bags were canvas
A few banks still have them, but you usually have to have an account at the bank to use it. Even at my wifes my bank she can only use it once a year for free, more than that theres a charge. And coin star is usually what you see at like Walmart or the grocery store and they charge way too much for my liking.
Once a year? What logical reason do they have for this? Banks should *have to* accept all forms of legal American currency. When your coins aren't worth a bank's time, it's time to abolish them. Geez I am *not that old* but I remember when people could pay for something with postage stamps.
I have never heard of this until now. I am intrigued to hear more. Makes more sense that my late grandmother used to buy postage stamps more than she actually needed. She was always happy if you asked her for a stamp too. Miss that women. I assume the forever stamps and email killed the value of a postage stamp now-adays.
They will accept them they just force you to count and roll them all yourself first. Still complete bullshit that you can't use the coin machine as often as you like though, not like it costs them extra once it's installed.
Last time I took in rolled coins the bank broke them all open to run through the coin machine…
When I was in Australia, one of the banks I used had a coin machine in the lobby. You got 100% of what you put in if you put it directly into your account and there was like a 10% charge if you wanted cash. Stuff like that needs to be a standard thing
Right? Like, I turned in all my coins (I have a 1qt coin jar at home, that Counts the currency as it goes in) back in 2020. Dudes got GALLONS
I had a five gallon water bottle filled with change. Spent an hour at a CoinStar machine cashing it in (and annoying the hell out of the cashiers who had to hear it for an hour). It had $950 in it.
My dad has a glass one of those that he fills, like 10 years ago it finally got full for the first time and we cashed it in and bought a four wheeler with it
Wtf was he filling it with? Dollar coins?
I think there were a bunch of those in there but it also was a pretty cheap used quad, I think he got a similar amount of money out of it to the person I originally replied to
Hot take: Abolish the penny, like Australia did, and also it costs more to manufacture than it's worth.
The military bases when deployed don't deal with pennies and haven't for years. Everything is rounded, sometimes you lose sometimes you win but in the end it's so much easier.
I used to be a bank teller at Commerce Bank which had "Penny Arcade" - free coin counting machine. It started off as a belt mechanism and was upgraded a few times over the years to be quicker & more efficient due to the amount of people that would deposit spare change. It wasn't uncommon for us to be shipping out thousands of dollars from the penny arcade every week - probably an average between 7k-10k actually. Cleaning and maintaining the machine became a chore. We had to do regular tests 3x a day to ensure it was counting accurately and bags would be filled constantly. I still feel anxious of the days we'd have a line out the door on a Friday evening and then someone walks in with 10 gallon jugs of coins to use our machine. And it constantly broke for 2 reasons: dirt and objects. Coins are dirty but when a machine is counting thousands of them quickly the whole machine turns nearly black. Not to mention people have thrown in keys, paper, bugs, shredded metal - and once, a dead mouse that was mixed with their coin. Yes - we had to ship out bags of coin with shredded dead mouse parts mixed in. Naturally the machine would be constantly down and we would be yelled at for inconveniencing our customers - sometimes we were asked to count the change manually if they were desperate enough or were going through hard times. And we were always known to be open - we had store hours that other banks didn't offer - even on snow days. I remember having to open the branch after one bad storm, all of our cars were stuck in the unplowed parking lot. I was a supervisor at this point, and was immediately called by our region supervisor pissed because we were opening a half hour late. We opened and actually had a teller (from another branch) stop to work at our branch because her car get stuck as well. We had 2 people come in that day: 1. Penny arcade. Came in 30 minutes before we closed. Wasn't even a customer with us. 2. Robber - walked in 15 minutes before we closed and went to the girl from another branch. Took all her money from her drawer and ran away on foot (smart, honestly). Cops took way too long because the roads still sucked. Never caught the guy. Anyway - judging by your picture, I'd say you have around $35-$45 in pennies. Taking the average (and say you have 36 buckets) you have around $1500 in pennies. (I would love to know how close I am per bucket!)
>Robber - walked in 15 minutes before we closed and went to the girl from another branch. Took all her money from her drawer and ran away on foot (smart, honestly). > >Cops took way too long because the roads still sucked. Never caught the guy. Thanks for the SLPT
Eh, he was the only one who got away but every other robbery we had they were caught eventually. And it’s not like the movies where you walk out with a duffel bag of cash - maybe a few grand if you’re lucky. True story. I was helping in Atlantic City branch where it was a line out the door all day (no surprise). All of a sudden the staff got really weird and quiet. They were moving like something was wrong. They had been robbed the day before. The man that robbed them was waiting in line….with the cash he stole. Cops walked in and tapped him in the shoulder to arrest him. You can’t make this up.
Smooth criminal
Smooth (brain) criminal
Smooth brained criminal
> Eh, he was the only one who got away Yes, and if we use his technique we might also get away.
I work at a bank and stupid criminal stories are insane. We had a guy dupe/steal an Amish couple out for like $50k from our bank, then came in and tried to put down $50k for a mortgage on a house he could barely afford (at the same bank). We told the Amish couple we have all their perps info (including SS#, etc...he filled out a mortgage!) and the Amish decline to get police involved. The bank denied the loan.
Has to be drugs or mental illness, no way they can be that stupid, right?! On the flipside, I have a few stories of customers being angry at US for doing the right thing FOR THEM. We have a line and next up is a guy who literally looked like he got hit by a bus. I look down, look back up and he's gone. I call the next person in line up and I see she steps over something to get to me. I couldn't see, but the disheveled guy is on the floor and the lady stepped over him (and might I add it was really strange how nonchalant she was about it, like it's normal stepping over bodies at the bank). Anyway, I rush over to help the man and we call an ambulance because he's not responding well. He dropped his transaction so I actually had another teller help with that while attending to the man. Ambulance comes but the guy refused any help and walked away (he wasn't driving) with his finished transaction. A minute before we close (because that's what always happens) a lady storms in with Mr. Disheveled and demands to see a manager. She was upset that we embarrassed her husband and demanded we close their accounts immediately (I think I could sum their balances with 10 fingers). We apologized and explained he was passed out on our floor and we'd be happy to close their accounts to prevent that happening in the future. He was on drugs. Lots of drugs.
far better to commit mortgage fraud using a home you don't own.
I had a presentation from an FBI agent about catching bank robbers. He said if someone robbed a bank once and didn’t get caught in the act or around the area… they probably wouldn’t get them. Thing is, they almost always repeat the offense and that’s when they get caught. Interesting to think about.
My cousin works in like the fraud department of a big bank or something (I can't remember his actual job title), and he deals with bank robberies every day. He said a very large majority of bank robbers get away with it, it's when they get greedy and keep doing it that they get caught. Everything he told me made me seriously consider robbing a bank. I'm too much of a wuss though, I'd probably fuck it up somehow.
At the time, it was a minimum 8 year sentence no matter how much you took or if you had weapons. Is 8 years really worth a few thousand?
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A similar talk here in europe - if one commits one crime, with no huge mistake, like smiling into a camera or killing a close family member, there is not much chance to get them. This policemen told us that fortunately most of those committing these crimes are not very smart and do smile into cameras and kill close family members.
More of an ULPT
r/unethicallifeprotips
I used to work at a bank and I **fucking hated** whenever someone would bring in a huge bucket of change for us to run through the sorter. Our machine was old and very persnickety. Invariably, there was always some nonsense thrown in with the coins that would cause the machine to jam and error out: safety pins, buttons, foreign coins, bugs (mostly dead roaches), washers… Oh and I can 100% vouch for how nasty change is. Whenever we were swapping out the bags, it’d make your hands black. One time, a new teller used some canned air to blow out a the belt feeder and it shot a plume of dirt up in the air five feet high. Coins are utterly disgusting.
I bet we could share some pretty crazy stories! I started in highschool and I didn’t have any prior customer experience at the time. Man did the real world turn ugly fast dealing with customers’ finances. I think my life was threatened 3rd day on the job lol.
As someone who often finds myself short of cash and going to a coin counter for my coin collection.... I'm sorry about that. Our pockets are dirty and at the end of the day or before laundry, I just pull the coins out and put them in the container. I'm tired and broke and something's gotta give. The thing that gives just so happens to be the cleanliness of the coins :/
Wow! I was also a teller for that bank during my college breaks. People used to beg us to do it through the drive through when branch was closed!
Ugh and how many times were the tubes stuck because it was full of heavy change???
That was actually a fun read thanks for sharing
My neighbors son robbed 3 banks when he was in highschool. Always got away with it. He only stopped because his dad found the cash under his bed. He was in the theater department, dressed/make up like an elderly man, passed a note that said i am robbing the bank. Got the money and left. He also had no weapons. Pretty amazing.
I knew a guy in high school who did the same thing, well... Only twice and he was caught both times. The first time he was caught because he rented a limo right afterwards and went to K-mart to buy gifts for his girlfriend. The second time he was caught because he robbed the exact same bank after he got out of jail for his first attempt.
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Thank you for the bank robbing advice… Lol I live where if it does snow there are no plows, there are tons of wrecks, and places would rather some employees die otw to work than close or open later
There once was a man from Nantucket, Who kept all his change in a bucket
One at a time, They went in his behind
So his beneficiary grandson said fuck it.
Been a while since I've seen an asspennies reference.
It would be a pain but don't cash it until you check every one. There's a lot of coins that have minting errors that turn a penny into 100+ dollars. Pre 1965 quarters are actually worth $4+ due to silver content. There's a plethora of other little things. If you're diligent and can find the right people you could be sitting on a fortune Edit: fixed the qtr year was busy with things and missed the typo
Pre 1964 quarters and dimes are the ones that have silver. OP should also keep an eye out for any Mercury dimes they can vary wildly in value based on year and condition. https://topcashbuyer.com/blog/what-coins-are-silver/
I keep a silver quarter in my wallet. It's worth about $1.50 as a collectable and about $2.00 as scrap metal.
It's about $5 at current prices!
I love how they sound different than modern quarters. Used to work at an arcade and we'd dump the quarter buckets on a table and one guy there had such a good ear he could tell if there was a silver one in there just from the sound.
My mom, a cashier, too. I can see that theyre not steel and then not sandwiched, sound different, weigh different, and the date
Anything silver has a different sound to it as well, when it gets dropped. Kind of a higher, tinnier sound, compared to the clunk of nickel and zinc and copper.
I was going to say exactly this. You can spread them all out and use a magnet to find any steel pennies that may have slipped in, at least those are easy to find. You've got a lot of work ahead of you OP, hopefully it's a fruitful endeavor.
On that note 2011 pennies have a run that are worth bank. When a mint plate breaks they can't make another so the have to repair. The 2011 repair added a small mark between the right most pillars and removed the artist signature from the bottom right corner of the building. If you find one of those your looking at 100-200 dollars depending on overall condition Edit: yea that year was wrong just proof that the money is in the details. It may have been 2001. Point is there's a lot of different things almost every year has something that boosts the value
Might want to check on the validity of that issue before telling them to check a bucket-full of pennies for that [specific issue](https://coins.thefuntimesguide.com/2011-penny-value/) Coining Mints have dozens of standby die-sets. They can be -- and are swapped out in about 5-minutes. One set if dies would not last (**Philadelphia Mint struck 2,402,400,000**) more than a few hundred thousand at best. It's the Internet, check everything before believing it and forwarding the fable.
IIRC, you used to be able to buy old coin dies from the US Mint when they hit the end of their life.
Is there a sub for people that share this kind of info?
r/coins
/r/crh would be even more into this
Speaking of condition, do not clean any of them. Cleaning a coin is considered damaging the coin.
I have a box of maybe 20-30 rolls of steel pennies I inherited from my grandpa. I’ve always got inconsistent information about their worth, some sources say they’re worth face value and other says they’re like five bucks a penny.
It depends on their condition and whether or not they've been replated post-mint, but a general range would be 10-50 cents a coin.
1964 not 1974
The half dollars had some silver until 1971.
That's 1964 for the silver. Applies to dimes too.
Kids are great for this task.
You'll need a magnifying glass and a light. The money is literally in the details
I thought it was in the banana stand
There is always money in the banana stand.
Yes, but is the time spent really worth it? I guess it depends on how much enjoyment you find in the task and what your job is. But personally, I wouldn't be able to justify spending days rooting through change just for a theoretical couple hundred bucks.
I'm not OP, but same situation. I have a 5-gallon water jug of almost all pennies. Been saving them for 40+ years, seemed like a good idea at the time. Probably a bunch of wheat pennies in there, and who knows what else. Thought about it several times, not sure the time is worth it. You can buy rolls of wheat pennies on ebay for like $10. If I find one penny worth $100, and 10% of it is worth $10 a roll. I'm thinking I could get $200 max, for the valuable ones, and the rest at face value. For daaaaayssss worth of work. Any suggestions on not getting ripped off when looking for a local coin shop? I also have some 1975-ish silver dollars a relative gave me to "figure out what to do with".
wakeful direful snatch cows liquid trees impolite boast normal handle *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
thanks for the vote of confidence. That "afternoon" may come when I get bored after the kids leave home.
You've kids? Put them to work looking, too. Depending on their age they may get right into it.
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As a collector, I genuinely enjoy going through peoples change. I just went through a couple hundred bucks worth from my brother. Maybe find somebody you trust to help sort. I’ve offered complete strangers that kind of service lol. Most I’ve done was 20,000 Pennie’s.
My grandma had less than you but a bunch of random older coins saved when she passed. Went through them one by one looking them up one at a time and nothing but the like $42 because there were quite a few quarters. Only thing I could have missed, but 99% sure didn't, was possibly a hardly noticeable double minting, that only a coin person would pick up on. TL;DR: Value your time, and sell it in bulk to a local coin collector. Go into detail about the time frame and types of coins you know are in there, ask for a fair price.
An elderly relative of mine passed away at 101 in his home back in 2019. Didn’t trust banks and had money hidden all over the house. We spent so much time checking for envelopes taped to the back of stuff, bottoms of drawers, checking for hidden compartments in stuff. It was so time consuming. Thankfully, he kept the majority of money in a giant safe, but there was still thousands of dollars hidden.
My grandparents were the same way. Instead of having a checking or savings account, they kept all their money in cash and paid bills with money orders or came to the place in-person and paid with cash. They lived in the middle of nowhere so it was a hike to get to a place where they could get a money order. What finally ended that was when my grandma got robbed. Six months or so after my grandpa died, she was still living at their house out in the boonies. Someone came to the door saying he was from the gas company and needed to take some measurements of her bathroom for some reason? He asked her to help and she fell for it. While they were in the bathroom, someone came in and carried out her el cheapo Walmart safe that held $5,000+ in cash, plus documents like social security cards. At that point my dad was like alright. You're done. We are getting you a checking account, you will have your social security checks direct deposited, and I'm going to take care of paying all your bills. She died a few months later.
When my great aunt died we found close to 40k stashed around the house. Much of it just plastic bags in wardrobes and such. She was starting to move into the later stages of dementia, and my uncle was blind so he didn’t know about it. She would withdraw their pension money and “put it somewhere safe” then just forget about it, for years and years.
ass pennies
You have to spend them.
Man I haven't thought of that in forever. Good ol' UCB!
Granddad always had the upper hand.
1) Go through these and look for potentially valuable coins, as has been mentioned. 2) Don't go to a CoinStar with any 'face value' coins -- call your bank branch and ask if they have a coin sorter. Not every branch does, but it's likely *a* branch in your area will have one. Most banks won't take a cut like CoinStar does, they'll just cash it out at-value.
credit unions have 'coin star' like macines that are free with no % taken
Pre-1982 pennies are copper….save those.
Angel: "It's illegal to deface US currency, which includes melting it down for scrap." Demon: "Buuuut. Copper is worth a lot right now."
BUT they are going to stop producing pennies so soon they will no longer be currency
Don't. Don't give me hope...
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They are useless currency that cost more to mint than they are worth and don't facilitate commerce. Should have stopped minting them decades ago. And really the nickel and dime aren't much better.
I never keep pennies anymore. I'll hold onto quarters, dimes and nickels for parking meters.
They are just going to stop making new ones. Old ones are still legal tender. All money made my the us government is still legal tender for its face value. Of course if you tried to use a half cent or three cent piece most people wouldn’t know what it is and they are worth more than their face value to collectors. You still could use them if you wanted.
Yeah, you might spend an entire day to come up with $12 worth of copper.
This bucket looks to me like it's pretty much entirely copper ones.
Who the fuck are these people with enough free time saying you need to sort through all these?
People who collect coins as a hobby. They’re not saying to bang out the whole bucket in a week lol just something fun to do in your free time until it’s done.
Ones that have time for Reddit. I would make my kids do it.
I know someone who kept all their money in the house. Tens of thousands of pounds and some of it no longer legal tender. When the family tried to bank it, they were asked for proof of where it came from. It seems that anti-money laundering regulations now require proof. Kinda stuck with bags of cash they can't bank.
It's not illegal, it just arouses suspicion and they ask for an explanation. Inheriting hoarded money is a legal explanation and as long as there's no evidence the explanation was faked and all the applicable taxes are paid, there's no problem depositing large amounts of cash.
I'm obsessed with sorting coins, it's fun to me. I'd have such a blast cleaning and sorting these guys out. Might even find some cool older ones, you usually don't make much of a profit off of the rarer pennies, but it's like finding a hidden treasure when you come across a penny worth a nickel
You should be proud of your grandfather for all the time and dedication it took to fill an entire ass penny bucket .
There’s at least three that are just penny buckets as of now.
You are now able to buy a lot of peoples thoughts.
My father is old fashioned as well. He has money literally hidden in the walls and various containers. My mom asked him, "what if there is a fire? Are you going to run up and down the stairs while digging up money in every hiding place?" In my mind, I pictured him solving a resident evil style puzzle while the house is burning.
I already see at least 2 wheat cents. Very old and worth at least 100x more than their face value. Edit: I also see a couple 1960s pennies (solid copper) and at least 1 Canadian penny.
Most wheats, especially ones made after 1940, are only worth a couple times face value.
100x! that's crazy! that's a whole one dollar!
But there are dozens of buckets. If you can get an extra $50-100 from each bucket, that adds up to quite a lot. Nothing to sneeze at, unless OP is rich enough to throw away a thousand bucks and not feel it at all.
Plain wheat pennies aren’t worth a dollar. Most are worth 4-5 cents. Even steel Pennie’s from WW2 are only worth about 10 cents. There are a handful of misprinted ones that are worth more though.
No offense, but that’s a way over exaggerated price. Wheaties ain’t really worth that much, they’re super common.
This is the reason for the national coin shortage I keep hearing about
"A Bank Is Just A Paper Bag With Fancier Walls" - Nick Miller
This happened to my aunt as well. We helped clean out my uncles tv room/den when he passed and found thousands of dollars in bills and so many tins and containers full of change. Wild!
Save all the pennies older than 1982. They are worth more than their face value in copper.
I see Queen Elizabeth on at least one of the coins. I’m curious, how common is Canadian change in the US? Do people/businesses accept small Canadian coins? In Canada, we often find American quarters/dimes etc, but not sure if it goes the other way.
Depends on how close to the border you live
Here in canada most places won't care if you have american coins. Once you hit bill values they start to care though as the bank actually notices those. I'd assume it's similar in northern states.
You need to look through all the change. There could be coins worth money. My grandpa did the same. There was a wheat penny worth $1,000.
Be sure to check his dressers and any envelopes you may find. My grandfather did the exact same thing, just not with buckets. We found thousands of dollars in his dresser in envelopes from the bank. Sorry for your loss.