You’re walking along the beach and a plastic wrapped package is washed up. You open it and it contains a million dollars in $ 100 bills. You consider the possible alternatives and decide to keep the money for yourself, as you surmise that telling the authorities will quite likely relieve you of this booty permanently.
So now you’ve got a million dollars in a large duffel bag in your basement. You live alone. How do you improve your material circumstances, and convert this cash to investments, and spendable income without attracting the attention of the IRS or other authorities?
On the beach, huh? My first concern would be how to not attract the attention of the drug runners who undoubtedly will come looking for it.
Aside from the obvious “walk away” plan, I would present $100 bills for mundane $20-ish purchases. Then I’d stash the $20s I’d received in change and when I got a pile of them, I’d buy a CD. Then when I had CDs accumulated in different banks in the neighborhood, I’d cash them in upon maturity and buy something with them.
Of course, the IRS will eventually catch up with you if you do that, so my advice is to take all those $20s and move to another country, change your name, and hope Scarface doesn’t find you.
Keep your present job, or better yet, quit your present job and go on welfare. Rent a crappy apartment, get rid of your car.
Now that you have the means to look like you’re living poor, purchase some false identification, rent a great townhouse and a great car and start living large. Be sure to keep the living poor charade. Pay for everything with cash, and keep it in your rich house. Show up at your poor house once or twice a week. You have to make it look like you are living poor and someone else is living large.
A million dollars isn’t what it used to be and I am not that old so I would just take the long view. I would carefully hide the money very securely from everyone including any non-immediate family members. After that, I would just use my stash instead of an ATM when I needed money. I would just blend it into my regular cash stream and let my regular income build as savings and investments while my stash actually payed for most of the day-to-day stuff. Buying lots of mundane stuff with plain cash rather than credit cards means that savings go up fast. That would be very hard to spot.
It’s an excellent idea, but how much savings can you really shelter with that approach?. I charge and pay off about 35,00O - 40,000 a year on cards for a my single man lifestyle. Even after 10 years that’s only $ 400,000 in savings that you can shelter.
I wonder if you started using cash instead of personal or corporate checks to pay for large ticket recurring expenses like your house note and car loans, if the loan institutions would flag the IRS or other authorities even if these transaction were under $ 10,000?
I guess your bit by bit approach is the most solid one overall. Any big cash dump in terms of saving, investment or conspicuous consumption is going to get attention.
The incremental appraoch is the best one. Fold it into your regular spending patterns, then every year or so declare $15K or so as “gambling winnings.” Sure, you’ll have to pay taxes on it, but a little creative bookwork makes the amount declared perfectly laundered and legal.
I’d just slowly use it for regular entertainment purchases and such. Go out to dinner pay cash. Shop any retail use cash. Go out gambling use cash. Report any winnings to add them to your actual acounting. I wouldn’t quite my day job or anything. I’d just use the free money to slightly increase my lifestyle. I figure I could spend 15K a year easily without much suspicion, thats over 60 years of entertainment.
Assuming the money isn’t fake or drug money, what is the law on keeping it? I mean, shit, even if you DO pay the taxes on it, you are still left with a large chunk of legit money…
Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe the IRS doesn’t care where you got the money, as long as you pay taxes on it… Isn’t that how many gangsters ended up going to jail? It wasn’t the bootlegging, it was not paying taxes on the earned income. But I might be wrong…
Probably one of the most boring/cop-out-ish answers so far, so I’m sorry. You could donate a lot of it to charities, anonymously. And keep another large amount of it hidden somewhere, location to be revealed in your will, so that your children get it. Of course, then the IRS might just come after THEM instead, so that may not be the best idea.
I understand that for illegal income, but what about in this case? Is it just a simple case of “Finders Keepers”? If you report it, I am sure you will have to answer some questions, but what if it turns out to just be that Bill Gates was feeling generous and dropped a bag of cash on the beach… If you paid the IRS their part, do you get to keep the rest?..
Hit every casino in town, slap those $100 bills in the machines and play like a madman. Sure, you will lose a big chunk, but the odds are you will win some back as well and that will all be given to you with a 1099 form, totally legal winnings to be declared on your IRS form. Be sure to put the winnings in a different suitcase.
Of course, if the money was stolen and marked, then chances are pretty good one of those cameras in the sky will get a nice 8x10 photo glossy of you and you will be doing time in prison. But if the money is legit, pouring it into the machines might be the easiest way to at least win some of it back…and who knows, you might even double your investment! (One lucky pull on Megabucks…)
By the way, I will be more than happy to help you put money in the machines (for a 50/50 split) so give me a call when you get into town.
I like **Shagnasty’s ** idea, I could rip through the million in about 20 years. The extra $40k to $50k a year invested instead would add up to a lot in retirement. I already pay for cheap new cars in Cash and there are many other purchases/donations that could be made from the cash instead of my checking account.
I would take half a dozen bills. dips them into the water a bit and let em sit for a while. I would take them to a local cop I know and tell him a story of finding them washed up on the beach, and ask the cop to check the serial numbers to find if it’s stolen, or forged. If it’s stolen or forged, I would turn it all in hoping to get a little piece of reward money. If the OP won’t allow that, I’d just burn it.
I would set myself up as an “artist”, selling my art over the internet and a small storefront. I would hire a lawyer and take all the necessary steps to make this a totally legal and legitmate business, structurally at least. Then I would gradually buy my own “art” with the found money, report it as business income, and close the business once I’d gone through the million.
