If it is not rightfully yours to keep, it is not rightfully yours to give to charity. It would seem that if you do not feel you should take it, the best thing to do would be to leave it there.
That was a whoosh. 
A friend of mine put a lock on the door to his room because a roommate took several hundred from his desk. Probably wasn’t smart of him to keep hundreds of dollars in his room, but I’d hate to be in a living situation like that.
When I find coins on the street I either feed nearby parking meters that are about to expire or add the amount to my charitable giving. It’s a couple of bucks a month all told.
This reminds me of a story my grandfather told me. He frequented a store every week, and a number of times, the clerk would give him change for a $5 instead of change for a $10. My grandfather knew damn well what bill he had given the clerk. Finally, he’d had enough and wrote down the serial number of the bill he was going to present. Sure enough, the clerk tried to rip him off again, so he rattled off the serial number and caught the bastard red-handed.
The best find I ever had, hands down, took place in the Pedernales River in Texas. I was about 15 or so, and camping with a friend on his family’s property. We took our masks with us into the water, even though visibility was maybe two feet or so. Anyway, we snorkeled close to some very small rapids, and I found a $100 bill just kinda tucked under a rock at the top of the rapids.
Loonie – Canadian $1 coin, named for the bird depicted on the reverse
Toonie – Canadian $2 coin (the front shows Elizabeth II, so the piece is jokingly referred to as "the Queen with a bear behind")
One Christmas Eve, when money was incredibly tight, my grandmother found an unmarked envelope with five $100 bills in it, sitting in a empty parking lot. A friend told her that it was proof God was watching over her, and that she should go to church more often. My grandmother replied that she was an atheist, so it proved that God was cool with her sleeping in on Sundays.
Thank you muchly for explaining that wipes brow 
Once a friend and I spied a wad of money at the same time another patron of Wally World - out in the parking lot. It was $40, and we split it - $20 for her, and $20 for us.
I’ve always only found coins on the ground.
I would have said the same thing to the friend, Then I would have turned it in because someone is going to be looking for it.
She decided to feed her family with it, instead.
Selfish, I know, but grams was like that.
I wonder if that was some of BD Cooper’s money? :eek:
Can’t blame her if she really needed it.
Many years ago when I was struggling to get by, I found an envelope with $3200 and a deposit slip inside. I instead returned the money to the rightful owner and found it belonged to an older couple and the money was from an estate sale from their son, he died in an Army training accident in Germany. They gave me a very generous reward and gave some some odd jobs to earn more money. Hopefully when my day of reckoning arrives, St. Peter will look down on me and say “Well, you did do one good deed, I guess you can come in.”
Agreed.
When I was around 11, I went inside the nearby party store with my mom. I usually have a good eye for things, especially when I’m bored. Behind the door, I notice some fluttering paper. Two $50 bills! Of course, being the little kid I was, I excitedly ran up to my mom yelling “I just found 100 bucks!” in the most excited voice possible for all to hear. :smack: A man said it was his, and since we’d rather give it to a person who claimed that (even if he is lying, that’s his karma) then to have said “It may be…but it’s ours now!” He gave us a lot of pocket change. A huge amount, it supplied us with Slurpees and good karma for a while, I think.
I’ve found random things on the ground all my life. They’re usually easy for me to spot, especially if it’s something shiny. I’ve found more than my share of mediocre hair ornaments and jewelry.
My best finds have been $2 on the schoolgrounds (it was my first day of first grade so it made the terror die down a little. Finding two whole dollars is exciting to a 6 year old!), Some pesos on the ground when I was in Chicago, a coin which I believe is from Hong Kong when I was working as a cashier (in Michigan), A gold ring with diamond chips and some type of black jewel while walking home from elementary school, and another $50 at my high school last summer when I returned to visit a teacher. The weird thing about that was that school had just been let out so there were kids all over the place, how could they not have seen $50 on the grass? I took it into the office in case somebody had lost it. Nobody ever claimed it though, and I got it back a couple weeks later.
Never found loose cash, but I found a wallet once. There was $60 cash inside as well as the person’s license, credit cards, checkbooks, everything.
I brought it to the address on the license (it was near where I lived), but the owner wasn’t home, her roommate was. I didn’t know how much she trusted her roommate so I asked her (the roommate) to call her (the owner), who was at work at the time. I told her I was handing it over to her roommate, and also the amount of cash inside. She was of course delighted, and told me to write down my contact info so she could “thank me”. I was definitely expecting some sort of reward - but it never showed up.
I found a £5 note when I was a kid. I handed it into the police station. Unsurprisingly, the rightful owner never showed up to claim it, so it was declared my salvage and given back to me after six months.
Local horse betting establishments here are called TABs. Around 30 years ago, the betting slips were green and made of paper (now, they’re card and white with red marks). But back in the green skip days, when I was a kid, I found a $20 note in the TAB office (the note also green in colour, as it is today, so probably wasn’t seen as it dropped.)
It got handed in to the counter, in case anyone came back upset about losing twenty bucks (fairly considerable money then). No one did, and the money was returned to me. That was the most I’ve ever found that I got to keep.
I’ve found wallets before now, and handed them into the police. One got dropped by the owner, I found out later, because he’d left it on the roof of his car and forgot it was there on driving off. One odd thing I found, in the days long before concerns about abandoned things left by public buildings, was a briefcase with a dollar note sticking out of it, left on the footpath by the central library in the heart of Auckland. It was late on a Friday night, I needed to get home, and the nearest police station was several blocks away, so I handed it into the library reception. Couldn’t do that now, of course. These days, things get blown up by remote control robots when the police find abandoned bags and stuff.
I found a $100 bill on the floor at the retail store I manage. It was just before Christmas and the place was PACKED. After looking around at everyone, I noticed one woman frantically looking through her purse, so I quietly asked her if she had lost something. She said that she couldn’t find her $100, so I handed it over to her.
That was one happy lady!
It’s theoretically possible, but unlikely – D.B. Cooper made his famous leap in the Pacific Northwest. On the day the statute of limitations expired for his crime, I saw a restaurant marquee emblazoned with the slogan “DB COOPER – NEXT TIME TAKE THE BUS”.