I found $10.00 once while I was in the navy. I had $10.00 left to my name and figured I’ll go to the base store and buy stuff to make sandwiches with and then be broke for 4 days til payday. In the parking lot outside the store I found a $10.00 bill and no one was around. It looked like it had been there for a while. Since I have a habit of doing things to help people (little things usually but frequently) I figured karma was helping me out.
In the spirit of Sage Rat’s post, I once saved up $1100.00 to buy a car, took it out of the bank in travelers checks then decided against the car. Decided to live off of them and bank my paychecks. Then one day months later I had to change rooms in the barracks and while emptying the dresser found almost $700.00 dollars in travelers checks left over that I had forgot about. That was a happy day.
I went to use the copier in the high school library once, and found a $20 bill on the glass. I’m guesing someone tried to make copies of it for some (presumably nefarious) reason and left the original there. Karma at work again, I guess.
I found a $50 on the sidewalk once, and also $90 in the produce section of the supermarket.
Went to court to pay a parking ticket. A guy in front of my left an envelope sitting there and walked away. I picked it up to toss it out. It had 460 bucks in it. I found him in the can and gave it back. At court it may have kept him out of jail.
I was the manager of a movie theatre for too long and once I found a purse that had about 2K in hundred dollar bills and it had some really funny ID. Same woman in the photos but different names on about 4 or 5 IDs. I was about to call the cops when she showed up looking for it and the box office cashier said we had it.
I did fing 100 bucks on the street once and I looked about, nobody was near, so I put it in my pocket.
Most I’ve found is a wallet with about 30 bucks in it when I was 13. It was in a local pizza parlor, so I dropped it off with the manager along with my phone number, so that if nobody claimed it I’d get it. Turned out it belonged to a guy about 15; he called me to say thanks, but I think that may have been his parent’s doing.
One drunken night at a party, I started with 18 dollars in my wallet. I gave five to the host for a beer run, then in the morning I woke up with 40. Don’t know how that one happened. I think that’s the most I’ve found.
Not really related, but I figure I’ll share the story. I lost my wallet when I got out of a friends car after a run to Jack in the Box. It fell into the gutter on a rainy night, in a less reputable area of town about five miles from my parents house (which is the adress on my driver license). I had something on the order of fifty dollars in there. Two days later, my parents call me to say that someone had dropped off my wallet at their house. All the money was in there, and none of the credit cards were touched or used. The guy didn’t speak any English or leave an adress or number, which is unfortunate, because I would gladly have given him all the cash in there in exchange for not having to deal with replacing my ID, credit cards, et al.