This evening, I schleped over to the store for a quick shopping trip to grab a few items for the fridge. I grabbed a shopping cart on the way into the entrance and found a crumpled-up 20 dollar bill in the corner - score! I’ve found lots of change, occasional ones and fives and once returned a lost dayplanner with a stack of home downpayments :eek: back to the Realtor.
What are your ‘found money’ tales?
I volunteer at the school concessions for ball games. We find money after every game.
I found $120 in an airport one time. Laying right in the floor for all to see.
We lived in Germany, my husband was in the US Army. I got a job working at a different post, as a draftsman. On my way to my office, I found a five dollar bill on the floor. I picked it up, looked around, and quickly shoved it in my coat pocket.
Later that morning, a small group of GIs came by to see my coworker, and they started making plans to go to the snack bar. One guy said, “I can’t go. I had five bucks, but it must have slipped out of my pocket.”
Now you got to understand. Lower ranking enlisted members are ALWAYS broke. I knew that to this guy, five bucks was a big deal. Hell, to our two-income family, five bucks was a big deal. I asked him where he lost the money, and he descrbed pretty much where I found it.
I gave him the five.
~VOW
I grew up on a river. Our property was downstream half a mile or so from a public park. We swam on our private beach every chance we got, so most of August and September. Of course, the park was a popular swimming spot for locals.
Twice I found money floating down the river. Actual folding green, just cruising along the current. A $1 bill and a $5 bill, a couple of years apart. Didn’t make me rich but is a fun story to tell.
Yeah, the airport. I dropped a friend off at LAX around midnight and there by the ‘rent-a-cart’ thingy was a Twenty, then a few feet away was a Hundy, then a few Fivers and what-not.
Came away with about $145 as I recall. Never saw that friend again. 
Hope you’re good, Jenny.
Another one: In many years of skiing, I’ve found all kinds of shit, but only once before cash. I picked up a dollar bill about 15 years ago.
Then, a couple seasons ago, I’m riding up the chair and I look down. What’s that? Hey, that’s MONEY!
I figured it would be long gone by the time I got to it. But no, it was there.
The very next day, found a fiver under Gunbarrel Chair. Strange…
When I ran the movie theatre, I went through each house with a flashlight at the end of the day. The finds went into a jar behind my desk, and were the emergency balance the till fund, and more likely the reward-the-staff fund for good grades.
Some of my brainiacs cleaned up come report card day.
One Saturday evening, when I was living in NYC with my ex, he suddenly remembered having left his brand new leather gloves somewhere in Manhattan, and he knew exactly where. I told him for sure the gloves were no longer there, that they’d been picked up by someone long before. But he insisted on going back to the place to retrieve them. Just to humor him, I agreed to accompany him on his fool’s errand.
So early Sunday morning we trekked to the place where he’d left his gloves. Lo and behold, they lay exactly where he’d left them.
And on the way home, he found $20.
I found $13.48 in a Walmart parking lot one time. I have found lots of money in my own laundry room. I have a jar in there to collect it. Not as much since my kids grew up.
My best one was when I was backpacking round Australia. I’d nearly run out of money- I’d just got a job, but the first payday wasn’t for 4 days, and I’d had to spend all but A$4 on paying for my room until then. I was ambling around the area, trying to work out how on earth I was going to stretch one measly dollar a day into something I could live on, when a $20 note fluttered down the street towards me.
No one else was in sight, I stood there for a minute, just in case someone came running after it, but my problem was suddenly vastly simplified 
Just four days ago I was rummaging through the glovebox in my car. I found a birthday card for me, from last December, in there. How it ended up in the glovebox I have no idea, but I opened it and found it was from my aunt. It also contained a $20 dollar bill which I have never thanked her for. About a week and a half ago I overheard a sad story at the office of my vet, this lady was having her dog treated and the vet, knowing she was in a difficult place(long story) was letting her run a tab. So I told them to put the $20 against her bill.
I found $400 in a little coin purse, (in was in bills!), on the street walking home, late one night, after working at the bar!
Five-ish years ago, on vacation in St Martin, we were at Lotterie hiking to the top of the central mountain. It is a strenuous hike through a rainforest ecosystem.
We pick up any trash we see and I thought I was picking up crumbled paper. It turned out to be someone’s cash, a bit over $1,000.00 in US bills. We were about 75% of the way to the top, so we decided to climb on and turn the cash in at the visitor center when we got back to the bottom.
Fifteen minutes later we encountered a young couple hiking toward the bottom, scrutinizing the ground as they walked. I asked what they were looking for and they described the money roll I’d found.
They were ecstatic. It was their first time on the island, so we chatted for a bit, giving them recommendations for things to do. We declined an offered reward, saving the day for such nice folks was reward enough. Then we finished our hike.
I find coins in the pool from time to time. The old record had been ~66 cents one day.
Then a year and a half ago I found a $20. I asked around if anyone reported losing a bill and got nothing. I turned it over to the pool manager and suggested that it go to the lifeguard holiday party fund if no one claimed it.
Oddly, just a few weeks later I found a $1 bill. So the only times I’ve found bills in the pool were quite close together.
(I also find jewelery. Used to be an almost daily thing but now I go a couple weeks between finding earrings and such. I think the water aerobics instructors are warning the newbies about wearing jewelry in the pool.)
When I was a teenager, I once found a lottery scratch-off ticket that was a winner outside a bar. Somebody had bought five, scratched them off, and somehow not seen the winner and dumped them on the sidewalk. It wasn’t a complicated game, either: just match three values out of six in a box. I won $25.
This one doesn’t really count since it was my own money, but when I was cleaning up my closet about six or seven years ago, I found two uncashed checks that totaled $3700. They were almost a year old, and they were money owed to me that I somehow – and I have no idea how to this day – forgot to cash. One was from a big company, so I just cashed it (even though it said “void after six months” on it. It went through fine, though the big company did call me to make sure it was I that cashed it.) The second one was from a personal client, so I called them up and let them know the situation, and they checked their finances and saw the uncashed check in it, so they sent me a new one.
One night, before heading out to my daily yoga class, I wrote out a check in payment for a retreat I had signed up for. The check was completely filled out, in a white envelope.
When I got to the studio, the check wasn’t in my purse. I pulled out my checkbook and wrote another one, wondering why I even went through the exercise of writing the check at home.
On the walk home that evening, I was looking for the dropped envelope. I saw a white envelope lying in the gutter under some dead leaves and other debris. I picked it up. It wasn’t the envelope I had lost. It contained 70 euros and a thank you note from John to Bob. No last name or other identifying information. And this was in the middle of straight-up residential block, so there were no stores or businesses nearby where I could make a lost and found inquiry.
So I kept it. Keep in mind, I live in the USA. Euros? It sat on my dresser for awhile. Finally I gave it to my godson ( who was living with me at the time ) when he was looking to ”borrow” money. I told him he could keep it but he had to deal with exchanging it.
Shortly after I got home the night I found the envelope, I did get a Facebook message from the person who found the check I lost. I thanked them and told them to just destroy it.
I’ve posted about both of these before… Last year I found a folded up $100 bill on the floor in the pop aisle at the grocery store. I turned it in to customer service, then kicked myself later thinking I shouldn’t have turned it in but just given them my contact info if anyone came looking for lost money. Oh well.
When Mom was alive she always used to tell us that after she was gone, we should never throw any books out without looking through them first because she would sometimes stash money away in books. Well, when we were cleaning out her apartment after she passed away last year we didn’t find any money in books, but at the end of the day as we were finishing up my sister in law was waving around a small box from a piece of Waterford crystal asking “Do we need to keep this?” She was just about to toss it when my sister said “Hang on a minute”, opened the box, pulled the foam padding out of the bottom, and found a wad of $20 bills in the bottom. Over $1000 if I remember right. Of course then we started debating whether we needed to go pull everything out of the dumpster that we had thrown out and go back through it, but decided not to.
Back in the mists of time when car phones were rare and pay phones required coins not cards, (late 70s) I was in the habit of checking the coin returns on said pay phones. Struck silver with one that had malfunctioned as there were some coins, and then more coins, and then even more coins! I can’t recall the actual total of my find at this point, but it was in the area of $10 to $15 worth of mostly nickles and dimes and some quarters. Quite the haul for an 8 year old kid at that time.
My dad and I were on a camping trip once - on the cheap because we had limited funds. (there were free campgrounds in those days.
We were driving along a rural road, and came across a bunch of stuff all over the road. We pulled over and both of us ran around picking up whatever we could. It was obvious that a ladies purse had basically exploded on the road.
We presumed that she had left her purse on the roof of her car and driven off. I was looking for ID an came across a small change purse. Opened it up, and there was over $400 in cash. Enough in those days for a holiday in hotels with pools, TV, restaurant meals… Instead of camping and cooking beans.
My dad then came across pictures of her kids, and the info from her welfare cheque - just cashed, virtually her entire month’s income was in that change purse.
My dad drove directly to the police and turned it in. Evey nickle. I was so proud of him that day, I could burst.
We had a fantastic camping vacation.