Do you or anyone you know have a stash of cash in or around your house? I ask because I found out my inlaws have several thousands in a secret hidey-hole - not in anything fireproof, tho, so if the house burns down, so does their money. My MIL says it’s for “just in case” - whatever that means. I’m glad I found out about it - if the inlaws and my husband were all to die at once, I wouldn’t have had a clue and someone would have gotten a house with a surprise inside.
My grandfather used to stash silver coins in coffee cans in their basement, but we’re pretty sure we got them all after he died. They were divided among the great-grands for college expenses.
My father kept several hundred dollars in an old wallet in his sock drawer. Somehow, one of my sister’s boyfriends found out about it and helped himself. Charming fellow. I’m pretty sure my mom keeps a few hundred in cash in the house also.
My husband had an uncle who buried thousands of dollars in cans and jars around his property. His kids know about it, and they pretty much took it all. Nice, huh?
I, on the other hand, might have a $20 bill in my purse, and there’s a souvenir glass on my husband’s dresser that has a couple of bucks in loose change. I suppose if ATMs all go down, we’ll be screwed. But that’s a worry for another day.
So, do you have relatives who hide cash? Do you or your SO or whatever?
I have an emergency reserve of cash in my fireproof “safe” (just a locking box - a thief could easily carry it away to open at leisure). I also keep about $40-100 in my desk drawer to replenish the $20-40 I keep in my wallet on any given day. It’s not thousands and thousands, though.
Living as I do in hurricane country I keep a small stack of hundreds in a not at all hidden place at home. If all the power is out around here for 2 weeks I can still buy necessities. And if I evacuate to safer places I bring the stack along. It would really suck to be cruising along the interstate and have all your credit cards not work for whatever reason when you stop for fuel at some random truck stop and don’t have enough gas left to get anywhere else.
Disasters aside, IMO having one tank of gas’s worth of cash stashed in your car is always smart wherever you live. If you’re low on gas and the only open station’s credit card terminal isn’t working, you’re in a deep crack. Pull out $20 or $50 (more recently a bit more) and the crisis vanishes.
Likewise I always have 2 credit cards with me, ideally from different issuers. If one craps out, which they often do, you’re covered. They’re not very big or heavy.
Coincidentally 2 days ago my primary card got frauded out. Sure enough I was traveling and would have had to switch to cash to eat for the next couple days if I’d not had a different card right next to it in my wallet.
And no, I’m not worried about the cash getting stolen or burned up. Compared to everything else in the house burning up, the cash would the least of it.
But I sure don’t think what I do is in any sense comparable to people hiding large sums (on their scale or anyone else’s) in buried coffee cans, sewn into pillows, etc. That’s not sound emergency planning, that’s mental illness. Likewise keeping 6 months’ wages in cash in a proper security safe. That’s not sound planning, that’s either someone in the underground economy, somebody into CTs about banks, or potential bribe money.
We don’t, and I’m not aware of anyone in my family who does.
My wife had some relatives (her great aunt and great uncle) who were farmers in downstate Illinois. They were friends with a pair of brothers, who were “gentleman farmers” – the two brothers never married, and owned a house and small farm. My wife’s great aunt and great uncle helped to look after and take care of the brothers when they grew elderly; after the brothers died, they left all of their possessions, including their house and farm, to my wife’s relatives.
The brothers were hoarders, and this included having many thousands of dollars in cash stuffed here, there, and everywhere in the house.
my aunt squirrels money in various places …thing is she forgets where most of it is and .well find it while house cleaning …moving a room around and shell be “that’s where that went to”
When my MIL died in the 90s, her daughters found several £thousand hidden in various places: under carpets, in an old suitcase in the loft, under the newspaper lining in drawers.
We all knew that there would be some money, but had no idea how much. It’s a fair bet that she had forgotten where most of it was. Much of it was in out-of-date currency, so they had to take it to the bank to exchange it for current notes.
I don’t keep more than $300 cash around, and I don’t know why I would keep more, though @LSLGuy gives a reasonable scenario for doing so in his part of the world, not really in mine. If someone ransacked my house they’d get a few good guitars (though nothing worth more than a few hundred each, though one is worth maybe $2k) and that’s about it. You want my TV or the guitars, help yourself, that’s what homeowners insurance is for.
We keep some cash locked up, not hidden in a book or buried or in the sock drawer. Enough for an emergency (store computer glitch, gas to cross the state, credit card or ATM card frozen, contractor suddenly reveals that they’re charging 3% more for hauling brush if we use a card…).
When my father died, my parents’ bank account was frozen. Since then, I like to keep some cash on hand.
If I were a burglar looking for money, or anything portable of value OF COURSEIM CHECKING the UNDERWEAR AND SOCK DRAWER!
Lol. Here everyone does their own laundry, but the other day I was delivering an errant item and decided to peek underneath the stack of his undies. A roll of cash! I assumed he knew of it.
I casually mentioned a cash stash, his reply was confusion and denial. I should’ve played along and said never mind, he had completely forgotten about it. But he had to check, and came back amazed.
Kind of makes me wonder if I just left some stuff that looks expensive or desirable that I no longer want just laying about plainly in the main room they’re likely to look first. My PS4 that I never played, and old Macbook or two that’s been wiped, an old broken iPad, stuff like that, so if someone breaks in, they think they’ve hit the jackpot in the first room and just take that stuff, but they’re really just sort of taking out my trash, in a way.
Most of my cash lives in a fireproof safe but I keep a tank of gas worth in my purse in an out of the way location for just in case and also there’s a hunnert dollar bill in a known spot in case a house sitter needs something for the doggos. Outside of that, I do occasionally find bills in seldom used coat pockets but there’s nothing planned about that–I just had a bill to stash and didn’t have my purse with me. Always fun when I find a surprise munny.
Lots of financial advice recommends having an emergency stash of funds in your bank account that can cover six months’ worth of expenses in case you lose your job unexpectedly. Much more rarely discussed is how much actual physical cash you should keep at hand in case your access to your credit/checking/saving accounts is disrupted, whether it’s by natural disasters, hackers, or some other kind of crash of the financial system.
This article recommends keeping $1,000-$2,000 nearby:
Everyone has a different idea of what contingencies they should be prepared to deal with, and everyone’s individual needs also vary: if for example you need to plan for taking care of three kids and three dogs, you’ll want to have more cash around than if it’s just you and your spouse.
In my case, it’s just me and my wife. We keep about $1K in a fire-resistant safe along with assorted precious documents (car/house titles, passports, etc.). I also keep a $100 bill folded up inside my cell phone case, just in case I lose my wallet somewhere away from home (so does my wife).
I’m not aware of any family/friends/acquaintances who squirrel away irrationally large amounts of cash.
Our apartment has a small closet safe we keep stuff like passports and some reserve cash in. I would agree with the article that $1-2k in emergency cash sounds about right. There have been a couple of times - 2003 NYC blackout and Hurricane Sandy when the power was out and all the ATMs were unavailable.
My wife does have a penchant for doing the “weird old hoarder” thing with valuables like jewelry. You know, squirrelling them away in odd places she can’t find six months later.
Not a family member, but a friend of mine keeps several thousand
dollars in her apartment because she’d lose her SSI and MediCaid
if the government knew she had it.
I usually keep $3-500 in cash in my car, along with a credit card for emergencies. I’m not likely to need cash out here on the farm, and my car is with me if I leave it. Just enough so if I need something, somewhere where credit cards aren’t accepted, I can get it. Yes, it could be stolen it someone went through the car, but it’s never happened and I can afford it if it does.
I used to keep my money stash in my sock drawer until our house was burgled and I lost +/- $800 (among other valuables). Since that time, two things happened: I quit smoking which significantly increased the amount of stash money that I tuck away, and I now hide my cash inside an old DVD case on a bedroom shelf.
My husband and daughter have been told that, when disposing of my belongings in the event of my incapacitation/death, they should NOT chuck A Fish Called Wanda into the bin for Goodwill.
(Although it does tickle me to think of a person actually willing to shell out for a relic DVD of a 1980s gem of a comedy, buying it from Goodwill and finding several thousand $$$ cash inside the case. Hard to improve on that movie, but a nice payday would do it.)
When I was married to my first wife, we drove up to her parent’s house for the weekend reasonably often. We always locked the outside doors but we lived in a shady neighborhood with no alarm system on the house. One Sunday night, we came home and found the front door unlocked and everything of value gone. My wife had a collection of silver dollars her father gave her that were “hidden” in her underwear drawer. The drawer was dumped out on the bed, and the dollars were gone. They never found who did it, but ever since, I never keep more than $10 in cash in the house other than what’s in my wallet. There’s no reason to. I have easy access to an ATM should the sudden need arise for some extra cash.
When I was working, I would occasionally get a few hundred dollars in cash to use for “walking around” money. I kept it in an envelope hidden in the refrigerator. I retired right before covid hit and didn’t need cash because I wasn’t going anywhere to use it. Last week my refrigerator broke. In cleaning it out, I found $150 I’d forgotten was in there.
When I was preparing to move into my house in 2003, I rolled up several large jars of coins so I wouldn’t have to move them. I put $500 in the bank and kept about $200. That is now in a canvas bag on the floor in one of the closets.
