I also like Shagnasty’s approach and it was immediately what occurred to me. It does have a slight flaw. After a while you are going to have a whole lot of noticably old currency, espcially nowadays that the design changes every five years or so. I know that old currency is still legal tender but will they guy who spends loads of old cash get noticed?
Sail small boat to Cayman Islands, deposit in numbered account, use as wanted at less than 10K at a time.
Actually 1 million is easy. 100 millon would be hard due to not only amount in value but volume and weight of paper
Bold words, but actually a million is not likely to be all that easy to slide into the confines of regular a middle class/upper middle class lifestyle. At some point you’re going start attracting attention to yourself if you have a substantial cash based lifestyle. The IRS may be slow but hey aren’t complete idiots. Doing large, completely paper trail free transactions is likely to be risky and difficult.
Put me in the camp of leaving it be or taking it to the fuzz. It belongs to drug runners, I’m sure, and unless I were prepared to leave the country immediately, the results of keeping it are not good. And a million’s not enough to live off for the rest of my life unless I can invest it well, which is gonna attract attention.
Hm. I have to assume that I’m trying to conceal a million dollars worth of money? All right — it’s not very safe, and it isn’t much like me, but for the purposes of the exercise…
First, I’d buy a counterfeit-detecting pen, and one of those counterfeit-detecting UV lights if necessary at Office Depot. With my own money, in cash. I’d check several bills at random before I spent any of it — $100 bills are so regularly marked that a few more marks among the stash wouldn’t seem unusual if they were spent carefully.
Second, I’d check to see if the serial numbers were in any kind of order or if the bills were otherwise marked. Again, UV light works well for this purpose, and I just happen to have a UV LED keychain. If they money seems okay to spend, then I guess the OP’s assumption is that I have to find a way to spend it.
I’d continue to work, but I’d probably have the luxury of finding a job I enjoy more, so I’d go get one.
I’d change my spending habits slightly — I don’t want any one person to notice that I’m spending a lot of money at their store, so go to several stores instead of just one. Prefer Mom-n-Pop operations, where my purchases are less likely to be tracked with Club Cards, phone numbers, serialized numbered coupons, or national customer databases. Buy used cars from individuals rather than from dealerships.
Last: start a garden. Pay somebody to keep it up. Occasionally bring in garden products to work. This is a good cover story for why my bank account doesn’t appear to spend much money on food — a garden creates a product with value (food) that is pretty hard to track.
I’ve been pondering this over lunch, and came up with the following:
Turn in $160K or so to the police. They’ll hold it and check it out. When it comes up clean, it’s yours. The Feds get their cut, and you have $100K cash to invest and spend. Over the next several years, make a number of trips to Las Vegas. Gamble lots. Hope you win over $1600 in a session so the casino will document your winnings. This gives you a paper trail on the “gambling winnings.” Over two years or so, declare $275K in winnings. Pay taxes on it. You now have documented $250K in cash in your legal possession, at the cost of about 1/10 your total score. Start spending as you wish. The quarter-million explains your source of wealth, and unless you start springing for really big-ticket items right away, nobody is going to notice that you have a bit more than that. With a quarter-mil stake, you can do some investing that will keep you set for life, and use the rest as pocket money. You are highly-visible, and the Feds vouch for your honesty. It’s a win-win.
Find a crack head and launder it.
Found property is fully taxable to you on the date you officially acquire it (IRS Pub. 17, pg. 87). I remember hearing something about how if the police cannot locate the original owner after a specific period of time, then the finder is allowed to keep it.
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Buy a very nice fire-proof safe.
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Basically follow Shagnasty’s plan, keep my job, invest way more of my pay, and use the cash for day to day needs. I’d probably quit my current job and get a more pleasant, lower paying job. I’ve actually fantasized about this quite a bit sitting in traffic.
Couldn’t you hit various banks over the years with a story like, “My nephew just graduated and I want to give him $1000, can I trade these old, wrinkly hundreds for ten crisp new ones?” I think that would solve the old currency problem with a minimum of suspicion.
This, combined with starting your own business - a LEGITIMATE business - which you work, and over time, you make regular deposits to your business account AS INCOME - a thousand here, a thousand there. Easily 2 - 3k/week in cash would not draw too much suspicion, particularly if you were in a consulting business, like computers, or even better, “self-help seminars” or a cash-heavy business like “massage.”
I’d like to have my own business, and I’ve settled on a catering truck (aka “roach coach”) as my target business. It’s pretty amazing how much money you could launder through a cash business like that, while not working all that hard. It’s a great excuse to go to music and sporting events and other popular venues, and who’s gonna notice that the lunch truck isn’t actually selling lunch 'cuz I’m inside having fun…
Also it occurs to me that cash money spent in home improvements are fairly hard to track, especially if one has a lot of power tools and appears to be a recycling, DIY kinda person.
I’d eventually “retire” from the roach coach, letting someone else run it for me and just go onto a cash supplemented economy (my needs are modest–I’d drive around and camp a lot) and leave anything left in the duffel to my kids when I croak…
Assuming I had the disipline.
I’d take 5grand out and go on a nice vacation; then I’d keep the rest tucked away in a safe deposit box untill I retire.
With that Million on top of what I hope to be my already healthy 401k, I could move to some country where the US couldn’t touch me if they wanted to.
Hmm, I wonder if Jamaca has a neutral policy on these matters?
Okay, here’s what you do:
You go to a casino and start playing baccarat, blackjack, pass-line craps, and other low-vig games that have house odds roughly around 1%. You keep playing until you’ve amassed more than $10,000 in chips. Then you cash it out. When the casino cashes out an amount of more than $10,000, they have to file a form with the IRS stating your winnings. You will now have to pay tax on that money, but once you do, it’s ‘clean’.
I’m assuming you don’t mind paying the taxes on it.
Another option is to invest in non-standard commodities like rare coins. Buy them here and there, build a collection, then sell it when you need the money. The government can’t know when you bought the coins and for how much.
Another option for ‘cleaning’ the money would be to find some rare item that has recently appreciated greatly in value. Say, some rare baseball card. Then sell it. Tell the government you found it in your attic. I’m not sure if that would be declarable income, though. I don’t know U.S. tax law.
This should be no problem.
First, as Fish stated, a few bucks buys counterfeit detecting pens and UV device. Now you know your money’s real.
Let’s follow Sam Stone’s idea of a rare commodity. Get something you know about, or educate yourself: In my case, that would be baseball cards. Rare books, coins, or any suitable thing that interests you will do.
1)Buy for cash.
2)Sell to a major dealer: If you bought the right items, you can get about 75% of your purchase price back when you sell. Now you’ve got 750k.
3)Report the 750k as capital gains. State that, a few years ago, you bought a “surprise box” at a yard sale. Inside this large cardboard box was an old cigar box with the bbcards, coins, whatever, in it. You paid $10 for the surprise box.
Now you owe capital gains tax of 20% on $749,990. This leaves you with $599,992 free, clear, and legal.
I’d rather have about 600k of legal money than worry, for years, if today is the day that the Infernal Revenue boys are gonna’ come knockin’.
Another thought: Some have expressed a fear that this would be druggie’s money. Of course it probably is, but so what?
If they see you pick it up, you won’t be leaving the beach with it anyway, so the question’s moot.
Unless they placed a GPS device in the bag (how likely is that?) they won’t know who got it. No problem there.
Eh. Those things are more or less worthless, in my rather extensive cash-handling experience. They give a large number of false positives for counterfeits, and the good counterfeits won’t show up anyway.
As far as found money, I’m not sure what I would do with it. Probably slip the cash into my regular stream – money orders bought with cash to pay for my bills and such. Less noticeable than a huge house or car purchase, and that way my pay can go toward savings.
OK, I’ll defer to your expertise on the matter.
Since the OP stated “You found a million dollars”, I suppose we shouldn’t even be considering the counterfeit question. If the money’s counterfeit, we haven’t really found a million, have we?
But point is that if you manage to ‘save’ a million dollars by making all your purchases with cash, that raises a red flag with the government just as much as if you’d purchased a new Jaguar or something. An auditor will be asking, “How can a person who makes $60K a year save a million dollars?”
Of course, one option is to blow the money on things that don’t give you a transparently flagrant lifestyle. Don’t buy a new house or a mercedes - instead treat yourself to a $50,000 stereo, go on lots of trips, have your existing home remodeled with the best appliances, marble floors, plasma TVs, fancy ‘spa’ showers, etc. There are plenty of ways to live the good life without ostentatious displays of wealth. Especially if we’re only talking about a million bucks. That’s just not much nowadays. You can easily spend $200K on a home reno, and you could probably find workers willing to work ‘under the table’ so they don’t have to report their own income.
The smartest thing to do would probably be to do a combination of these things. Pay a few of your bills with cash, and increase your savings by some amount that isn’t suspicious. If you currently make $60K/yr, you could probably safely increase your savings by $500/mo without raising any suspicion at all. Then invest in some non-standard investments like coins or art, and put it away for retirement. Spend some more to fix up your current house - renovate it, put on a new roof, whatever. WHen it comes time to buy a new car, don’t buy a flashy one outside of what would be expected at your income level, but throw a good cash down payment on it to lower the payments. Put yourself on a program to put away maybe $20,000 per year in investments and ‘savings’, spend a couple of hundred thousand making your house really nice over a space of maybe five years, then with the rest of the money just enjoy yourself in a non-ostentatious way. If you do need to convert some of it to ‘clean’ money, try the casino trick. The rest of it, enjoy life. Give some extra to your kids or family on occasion, donate cash to charities iin small amounts if it makes you feel good, go on trips, whatever.
The thing you really want to avoid is a sudden increase in your perceived wealth. A couple of years ago a city employee was busted here for scamming change out of the toll machines he serviced. His job was to empty each ticket machine for the LRT daily and deposit the coinage. He was skimming off the top of each one, pocketing thousands of dollars each money. He got caught because he bought himself a big house, a fancy car, and his co-workers started wondering how a city maintenance man could afford a million dollar home and a hundred thousand dollar car.
Had he been more discreet, he could have gotten away with this scam for a long, long time. Maybe forever, if he kept the amounts small and varied his ‘take’.
Over the course of 20-30 years I think I could slip that much money into my lifestyle. Pay for groceries in cash and also buy top of the line stuff- organic, specialty order, etc. Eat out two or three times a night at a place that has 30+ dollar plates. Take a trip or two a year, but expensive cash christmas presents, pay for a discrete lawn guy to take care of the yard, pay him in cash under the table, and any number of other small things that add up.
Gamble regularly, take 1,000 dollars to the Casino once a week for 20 years, you are likely to win some decent cash, and even if you don’t, it was fun.
With loads of cash for padding, you can have a slightly more expensive house or you can buy a cheaper house, and get a loan out for another house you rent out. Have the tenents pay in cash. Tell the tenents you charge 500/mo, but claim they pay 800 a month. You can funnel money into the houses, pay them off quicker, and funnel your money into something else. Sure, 300 a month padding sounds like small change, but doing it right, I imagine you could have 4-5 houses paid off by the end of it, and none may be the wiser.
You could also buy stuff at estate sales, auctions, or liquidators in cash, and sell it online and funnel even more money into that.
You would have the benifit of laundering your money at the same time you make additional money.
I don’t think it would be that difficult. I could have that million spent in 10 years without attracting too much attention, and could probably turn it into 2 million.