Assuming you do it in a sensible way, maybe saving 50% of your pay and spending the rest, do you really think anyone is looking that closely? I really don’t know, but I’d guess as long as you payed taxes on your reported income and didn’t drive a Ferrari, who’s to notice? I’m thinking I’d “save the million” over many, many years, not all at once. I’d take that chance.
One tip, here: some poorly trained bank staff will think “It is illegal to put cash in a safe deposit box.” so you’ll need to go ahead and conceal the nature of what you’re sticking in the box.
Also, I’d suggest spreading the deposit across a few boxes; those boxes are NOT insured, and while they are VERY safe, occasionally burglars do violate safes and drill out the safe deposit boxes. Also, modern vaults are not watertight.
It WOULD turn up in a good audit. The IRS has a good idea of what a given lifestyle takes to maintain; if you’re declaring 50K of pre-tax income and saving 25K a year, they’ll be looking for you to be living in an efficiency apartment and driving a 15-year-old car or taking the bus everywhere with your apparent $10-20K worth of non-saved, non-taxed money.
Illegal to put cash in a safety-deposit box? Why would anyone think that? Do banks want to know what’s in SDBs or prohibit certain items (I mean, apart from the usual sort of hazardous materials, like explosives, aerosol containers, or things that rot)?
:: puzzled ::
That’s not poor training; it IS illegal to put cash in a safety deposit box. But whenI worked at a bank, at least, our policy was to leave the customer alone toput things in their boxes; very rarely would I actually know what was being taken in or out, as the procedure was to escort the customer to the box, unlock it with them, and then step around the corner so they could dotheir business in private. This is pretty standard procedure at banks, so nothing in particular will need to be done to keep what you’re doing secret.
In reality, I’d leave the money right where I found it and call the cops. I don’t want drug smugglers, mafioso, or terrorists coming after my ass.
If I did keep it for some stupid reason, I’d probably go the route of setting up a sideline business to account for the extra income. Maybe a freelance tech support guy, for computer-illiterate people like my dad. Or maybe even a BDSM domme. That would have the advantage that my (mostly fictional) clients would certainly demand a large degree of discretion, so it wouldn’t seem unual if I didn’t keep good records.
There’s a guy in my town who bought a storefront with some back rooms, and is suspected of living there. He does no business and seems to have no source of income.
I sometimes wonder if he is laundering money, claiming to the IRS he makes so much a year and paying taxes on it. You can do this, not work, and live for decades on your found money. Is the IRS going to come check it out?
Not definitive, but I found several cites using google that it wasn’t in fact illegal to put cash into safe deposit boxes, but that a lot of banks have it in the contract you sign when you get one, thereby making it a binding agreement between you and the bank.
Also, it should be pointed out that it might be different depending on state. IANAL, just a poor shlub doing google searches.
But wouldn’t these purported mafiosi be just as p*ssed at you for phoning it in?
If you keep your mouth shut, how would they find out who got the money? These guys don’t have anywhere near the resources of the Feds, and we’re talking about concealing said find from the Feds.
I haven’t thought it through, but buying a house which is financed by the seller might work. As far as the seller would know you’ve just always paid him in cash.
As someone mentioned before, a big risk would be having the bills become so outdated that spending them would raise eyebrows. So I’d also slowly convert the cash to gold, buying a few 1 ounce gold coins at a variety of coin dealers every month.
So would everyone else involved in the sale, including the government. Papers are filed at closing stating exactly where the monies came from, just to avoid this type of thing.
It also explains the $25K/month rentals some people have.
The New Yorker had an article about a couple of very successful bank robbers a few years ago. They seemed to spend the cash very easily- lived completely off the grid, no job, no taxes, no credit cards, all other bills in the wife’s name. A bit of advice though- when you build your dream house and pay the contractors entirely in cash, don’t piss them off. A contractor who felt cheated reported the guy to the IRS, assuming the all cash thing was a tax dodge. The cops quickly realized who he was, and followed him till he met with his partner, then arrested them both.
Personally, I’m with the majority here- hide the money, tell nobody, and gradually use the cash for small transactions. It’d be very hard to catch something like that unless you are looking for it.
Toss me in this camp. Being self employed in computer repair, I could easily account for another $400-$500 a week in billable labor that would never blip an auditors radar.
Slowly scale up the business a bit over a couple years to where its grossing 10-15K a month, get a couple employees, Give away a lot of nice computers to friends and family while writing them up as cash sales and dropping the money in the till. I could easily clear $400-$500 per machine, offer free 3 year warranties and stuff to account for your high prices. Of course when/if they come in for warranty service they order some upgrades too (wink wink).
In a nutshell its would be childs play to create the kind of business scenario every small business owner dreams of, no biggie to eat a few mistakes, able to charge slightly higher than market prices and get it almost without question, buy some of the “little shit” like basic office supplies and other small ongoing expenses with cash. Do things like buying your employees lunch every Friday and things like that to inspire happy staff that will eventually help make for a more successful business anyway. Placing some of that cleaned money into investments could eventually create a revenue stream that allows you to retire well at a relatively young age.
Here’s what you do: increase you cash spending moderately. Go out and eat more often, buy some “toys” with cash, pay off a few bills with MO, and stop charging stuff. Max out your 401K. On the surface- on paper; all you have done is switched to a less spendthift budget, but in actuality you have done the opposite.
In other words, let us say you take home $30K a year (gross of 60K), and like most Americans, every year you put around 4K into your 401K,and slide around 3K deeper in debt. You spend 20K on nessesities and 13K on luxuries. But now you Max your 401K so it’s 12K a year, and start paying down your bills, so it’s now appears like you are spending the same 20K on nessesities, but 12K into savings, and 4K into paying off bills (it doesn’t seem to add up, but an increase of 8K into your 401K will only decrease your take home by around 5K), with only $1K or less a year on luxuries. However, in reality you are spending 25K a year (double) on luxuries. After 40 years you’ll have spend most of the Million, but you’ll have a bundle in your 401K (about a Million), no debts, and have had a nice but not extreme increase in your leisure lifestyle.
The thing is, you can’t change your liefstyle markedly on the surface. If you are driving a Civic, you can’t start driving a Lexus. You can move up to a Accord. If you normally go to Hawaii once a year for a week, then you can now go twice a year, and stay in a little nicer hotel. You can’t start flashing around huge wads of cash, either. Set a budget and live with it.
Geez, all these replies and no mention of a vending machine route. Sometimes the old ways are good, too, you know.
The only problem I see with this strategy is the same problem that drug dealers have always run into with their cash. Sure, buy the $50,000 stereo, but how are you going to pay for it? Slapping down 500 $100 bills might raise a few eye brows, especially considering that $100 bills are the most frequently counterfeited denomination. Same with buying a money order. Deposit it and write a check? You have the same problem when you open the checking account.
I’m kind of siding with the idea of slowly filtering the cash into your usual purchases, or buying into a legitimate business. Although the casino idea is pretty ingenious, too.
Man, what a fun thought experiment.
True, but the bad guys also aren’t bound by constitutional safeguards. The Feds will take me downtown and shine a light in my face; the Mob will grab a pair of bolt cutters and start lopping off fingers until I tell them where the money is. And after that, I’ll be killed and tossed into a dumpster somewhere.
Why the hell are people so worried about the guys who lost the money finding out about you? The only way they’ll know you have the money is if they see you pick it up and if they’re watching you pick it up they probably know that it’s laying on the beach so they wouldn’t let it lay on the beach to begin with.
Let’s dispatch with the worries, shall we?
Just imagine if you could go the rest of your life without charging gas and food purchases. A ton of money could easily be hidden in small everyday purchases.
The kids would also get a substantial allowance, ‘grandma’ would start a college fund for the children, you could take trips by renting an RV and a villa in Aspen, all cash. I would also go along with buying small lots of precious coins, stones, stamps, books, etc. Things that could easily be gathered over the course of a life-time or passed down from gramps.
How about trading up? Buy older cheap sports cars and keep trading up (with a little cash on the side) until you have your Enzo.
Or, you could start a business where you buy wrecked sports cars and then pay cash to some guy to restore them, then re-sell them for a ‘profit’, whereas in reality you won’t make a profit, but the money is now laundered.
I don’t think it would be much of a problem to plow through a million without trying too hard.
You just have to keep your traceable stuff within the parameters of your income. It wouldn’t take an accountant to figure this out. It would be challenging and fun, but not all that difficult.
Maybe I’m just overly paranoid from watching Alias on Netflix, but I would figure that if the money is just lying around somewhere, then it’s probably part of a “blind drop,” and there’s a better-than-even chance that a lookout has been posted to keep an eye on it. This lookout might not be willing to confront you in public, but he’s probably smart enough to write down your license plate number, or follow you home, or whatever it takes so his buddies will know where to find you.
Mind you, all this changes if the situation suggests that the old owners won’t be coming around. Let’s say the money washes ashore as part of the flotsam from a shipwreck. (Let’s say a drug boat was blown up by rival smugglers.) I might take the money then, because the smugglers’ buddies will just think that the money was burned up or washed out to sea or something.
As to spending the loot, here’s an idea: art. If you’ve ever gone to an arts & crafts fair, then you know how obscenely expensive good artwork can be. A nice painting could easily burn through a thousand bucks of your semi-ill-gotten money, and you could tell people that it was a gift from your old aunt Marge or whatever. A nice solid wood table or dresser wouldn’t look out of place in a modest middle-class home, and whose to say that you didn’t pick it up at a moving sale for a fraction of its value? And I’ll bet that many of these artists and artisans like to underreport their own incomes, so they’d probably be amenable to payment in cash.