This. It cannot be over-stated.
A few hundred, and they might not worry.
A couple of million?
The dumbest thing you could do is pick it up and carry it away.
If you do, spend all on hookers and blow, 'cause you’re a dead man.
Stop watching bad movies. I dealt with this point above. Unlike movies, drug dealers do not have a magic “people finder” ability.
A couple millions? Assuming that after deducing taxes and inflation, I get a 1% return on some conservative investment, and spend the principal so that it will last for 50 years (I’m already 49), that would make about € 4 000 / month of net income for the rest of my life (unless I make it past 100), plus whatever small retirement benifit I will get in 10-15 years. Seems quite enough for me. I might quit working.
There’s certainly no room for ostentatious expenses (and I’m not ostentatious by nature, anyway).
Ironically, spending your new found wealth on “hookers and blow” would probably be the surest way to tip the drug dealers off about who had found their missing money.
I know, right? Those drug dealers sell blow, and know hookers. Somebody dropping fifty or sixty large on hookers and blow will attract their attention. Now, if you put it in an index fund at Vanguard you’d be a lot safer. Most drug dealers have really shitty 401k programs.
Somehow I’m just not seeing the drug dealer thing; my 2 mil came from finding Hetty Green’s storage locker. 
A couple of mil? In cash? I’ll look at this hypothetical as if it just popped out of thin air and I found it in my bedroom one morning.
Well It’s not like you can just plop that money in an investment without somebody noticing. I think $10,000 cash is the limit before some specific paperwork must be filed.
How do you explain that much cash?
So, I suppose I would turn to using cash for all my daily purchases. Kinda funny, because it would be a bit of a pain in the ass. I buy a lot of stuff on line.
I guess you could buy gift cards for yourself. That may make it a bit easier. My house is nearly paid off, so I would do a bit of money transfers from retirement, and just get that over with.
I would slowly remove myself from my job. As much as I bitch about it, I do enjoy it and would never leave the crew hanging.
There are a few people I know that would get monthly gift cards or just hard cash. Though it would be hard to explain, and I suspect they would refuse it.
Then, work on the house. Hire help when needed. Most small contractors don’t have a problem with cash. Though, again, it would raise eyebrows.
Really, I wouldn’t do that much different at all. It would be a great cushion though.
I don’t think so. As it happens, I did know quite a few drug dealers as well as gang members in my misspent youth, and I know that none of them would just handwave away losing several million dollars in cash…not unless the authorities had already gotten it and they knew the authorities had it. Otherwise they would quietly be tearing the neighborhood apart looking for it. To me all this talk of stashing it away under the bed and using it without anyone noticing is the stuff of bad movies.
You are changing the OP though. Also, you’d be basically stealing that money without knowing who’s money it is, what it’s for or anything else…such as what the potential risks might be to keeping it under the table so to speak. Leaving aside drug dealers, you do realize that you could do prison time for all of this, yes, if you are ever caught, right? Maybe for some the risk/reward is worth the hassle and heart burn for worrying about it, but for me it’s definitely not.
Drug gangs are also not stupid, and they know their neighborhoods fairly well, living there and all. They would notice someone from the neighborhood who was spending more cash than they normally would, or some neighbor would notice and it could get back to the gang. They could also notice someone suddenly moving away and getting a new house somewhere right after they lost several million dollars. At least back in my own neighborhood everyone was always in each others business, knew all sorts of details about the other neighbors, and would certainly notice if someone from the neighborhood started spending cash differently than they did before. The OP says he’d keep it under wraps, but to me if you aren’t going to spend it differently than you already do what’s the point?
Also, it doesn’t have to be the drug gang who lost the money as the ones who will find it (nor might they be the only ones looking, since word would get around that millions were lost in the area…and not all the bad guys are drug dealing gangsta types).
You could, if you trust carrying the cash to a foreign country and then trust that you can protect it long enough to spend it in said country. Good luck with all of that playing out in real life, as opposed to a bad movie. 
I’m going to presume the money doesn’t have any inconvenient drug dealers attached to it.
I would first make a point of chatting to all my friends and neighbors, telling them I’d come upon this great work-at-home opportunity (to explain quitting my job and still having money). I would tell my work folks the same story.
I would spend the first six months or so quietly, spending most of the time in my house to bolster my story. Each week I would deposit $2,000 in the bank so it would look like a weekly payroll. And yes, at the end of the year I would pay taxes on this ‘income’ like the good little citizen I am.
Bit by bit, I’d do things like upgrade my car, do some repair and remodeling around my house, and after 6-8 months, I’d take a nice long trip, happily extolling the virtues of a work-at-home job that allows you to be flexible with your time off.
Otherwise, I’d probably go about life pretty much as usual. My biggest concern would be not to alert anyone that I had a big wad of cash in my house.
Two things drug dealers have access to are:
[ul]
[li]Crooked cops[/li][li]Ex cops who are now working as private investigators[/li][/ul]
Both can be presumed to have access to any resource available to the police.
A couple million for me would be enough that I would probably never have to work another day in my life. I guarantee the Lamborghini doesn’t even come close to being as attractive to me as a life with no obligation.
Yeah, I’ve seen the movies, and if I find a couple million in a storage locker, I’m closing that fucker right back up and walking away as fast as I can without looking suspicious. And if the drug dealers ask me, I tell them where I found it, tell them I didn’t know who it belonged to, didn’t want to be involved, and I don’t even remember this conversation.
Look. I’ve watched way too many Coen Brothers movies. I figure my only possible chance of survival is to act nothing like a character in a Coen Brothers movie.
Can I get an amen? Film characters kill you anyway, if you fill in ‘director’ for ‘diety’ (OK, I only read the OP and the preceding post. I’m just here to say amen).
So, you never heard of the book The Millionaire Next Door?
Lots of people with millions live very quietly.
I would go buy some expensive antique under the table like say a bunch of old baseball cards.
Then sell them and tell the IRS they were your grandpas, pay the taxes on that, then deposit the rest in my account like normal income.
If I found a couple million dollars…I’d turn it in to the cops.
If it’s someone’s legitimate nest egg, they’ll be contacting the cops in an effort to find it, and they’ll be very happy to get it back; I will have done a good thing.
If it’s someone’s ill-gotten gains, they won’t be contacting the cops. After a waiting period in which no one claims it from the lost-and-found, presumably I would receive the funds, pay the appropriate amount of income tax (state+fed = ~50%), and be truly free to do whatever I wanted with the rest, without ever having to look over my shoulder. I expect I’d invest it; depending on what stage of my life I was at, I’d either leave it alone to grow, or start drawing on it to fund a slightly early retirement.
Habeeb, how do you know that you weren’t observed going to/from the cache, like via a game camera or something similar? Or that the valuables in the cache weren’t bugged with a GPS/cellular transponder or something really exotic like a fluorescing tracer or tagged-odorant diffuser?
It really depends on what kind of ‘drug gang’ we’re talking about too: something like the Sinaloa or Gulf Cartel is going to have vastly different resources at their disposal—like trapping their caches with something like the above—than a bunch of neighborhood MS-13 wannabes. As gaffa noted above, just because gang members aren’t cops doesn’t mean that they can’t have access to some of the tools law enforcement uses. Take the game camera example, and use the time stamp on it with a socially engineered contact at a telecom company to, e.g., figure out which cell phones were near the cache at that time. Yes, Javier Bardem isn’t likely to be trailing you all the way to Samarra, but I wouldn’t underestimate the capabilities of a group that’s successful enough to be able to cache millions of dollars.
grude, I think you would enjoy the book A Simple Plan, by Scott Smith. It’s about a couple of brothers out hunting who find four million dollars in a crashed plane, and their efforts to keep it. I loved this book because the main character did just what I was hoping he’d do at every turn, and so I got a chance to see how it would have worked out, as if it was one of those “Choose Your Own Adventure” books.
I would have chosen…poorly.
A Simple Plan was also adapted for a movie, starring Bill Paxton.
The IRS already knows the truth from the guy you bought them from.
What, you want everyone involved to lie on your behalf? That’ll cost lots more, like all money laundering does.