f13.net

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31203790/

Ah hahaha.

She will never find it.

She should have done the smart thing and hid it inside a teapot.

Im not sure if I would kick myself for having thrown it out, or my mother for not warning me it was there.

This is also a Spongebob episode.  In the end, Mr. Krabs gets his money back from the dump.

Hahahahaha

How do people this stupid live to such a ripe old age?

We live in an unjust world.

Social services.

No, it's because they are all too stupid to realise that they died a decade ago.

Yeah, someone threw out my mattress with $1million in it too! Really!

Oh, and I have $134B in negotiable securities I'm selling cheap.

lol

It used to be a normal, traditional place to hide your money. Earlier in her lifetime the banking system was inferior to mattresses. Some old people don't trust newfangled ideas.

The entire story is pretty fishy. Lady claims the money was in US dollars and shekels. Even if it was entirely of US 100 dollar bills thats about 25lbs and a large sized suitcase of space in the most ideal situation. The woman is claiming multiple currencies so its a pretty safe assumption that they are not crisp bills of the highest possible denomination.   

It took over 24 hours for the old woman to realize her life savings was in the old mattress. They did not file a police report or explain how she had such a large sum of money in the first place. And was randomly searching three different dumps instead of just finding out where the dump her route used? Did not file a police report but contacted "Army Radio"? Smart plan tell the entire city there is a mattress with 1 million dollars in it instead of the police.  :awesome_for_real:

More likely, it's a story of "Old lady had a couple hundred bucks in mattress" and is now going to setup her own web site so that all the peoples of this great world can each send her 20 dollars in sympathy.

I think the Mythbusters should do a Million Dollar Mattress prime time special to see what that would even look like. 

Funny how cyclical time is...  :awesome_for_real:

This needs a prologue about a wind.

Oh god, no. Not again.


 :awesome_for_real:

So I went internet detective, and looked up how much space ONE MILLION DOLLARS takes up. The answer is:

The pile filled 643 cubic inches (~8" x 6" x 13") and was about the size of a 15" television. It weighed almost 20 pounds (9 kilos).

Um...but in what denominations?  Seems fairly relevant to the story. 

The largest US bill in circulation is the hundred.

This old lady could've easily had Grover Cleveland thousands. It would make her even richer, but it's not outside the realm of possibility (last I checked each one was worth $10,000+).

Each bill weighs 1 gram so its like 23lbs (10 kilo). Yeah, she could have had all sorts of bills but anything beyond a 100 is extremely unlikely. She at least vaguely portrayed the savings being from a life time of work. So a real high denomination seems pretty unlikely. Well, the entire story is very unlikely for many reasons at least.

Yeah, that's why I asked about the denominations.  If there's even a grain of truth to her story, it would likely be a lot of 1s, 5s, 10s and 20s thrown in there, and probably somewhat limited with the bigger bills.  If the average bill was a 20, that's 50 kilograms of weight.  I submit that her daughter would've had trouble even moving the thing at that weigth (when you consider that an old mattress itself is going to weight quite a bit as well).  If the average bill was a 10 spot, then fuggitaboutit.

That's one of the things that always annoys me in TV or movies, when they put "1 million dollars in used bills" into a small briefcase.  Even crisp new hundreds will fill a medium sized backpack or gym bag.

But then, most people have never seen a $10K bank brick of 100 $100 bills, so they have nothing to compare it to (it's a stack about a third of an inch high).

--ave