Yes, yes, I should seriously stop posting such news drivel. But still, I’ve often joked about the whole money-in-a-mattress way to save money here on Cheaplander. So it was kind of funny to read about this. Actually, I’m not sure whether I feel like laughing or sympathizing with this one lady who threw out her mother’s tattered mattress and replaced it with a new one as a surprise - only to discover that her mom was saving her life savings of nearly a million dollars in the old one! I’m leaning toward finding the humor in it, but damn, I can’t even imagine if that happened to me.
Wait, no, it would never happen to me. Because no one I know would ever do such an idiotic thing as putting that much real cash into a mattress.
What I want to know is how luxurious it feels to sleep on a million dollars in a lumpy mattress, when you could just buy a new mattress and put the rest of that chunk of change in a few banks.
Po-tweet!
Source: CNNnnnnnnn
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June 11th, 2009 at 4:22 am
I can’t imagine ever having a million dollars. Seriously, I don’t know how some people do it, but I guess they probably have property. A lot of older people who have lived a modest life and have a lot of money seem to get most of their cash savings from having bought property a long time ago and renting it out for decades.
I’m not sure that I’d want a million dollars though if I was just going to sleep on it. I’m by no means a materialistic person, but I have to imagine having that sort of money would enable one to pay for some experience for oneself (travel, education, etc.) or for someone else that’d be a better use for it.
June 11th, 2009 at 5:45 am
Orchid64- I agree. Having money just to sit on it (or in this case, sleep on it) is pointless. I’ve heard stories before of people who live like misers and when they die, leave their children (or the state, if they don’t have any) a few million dollars. It’s sad, because they could have used half of that money to live better, and still had a large emergency fund/inheritance. It seemed the mother wasn’t as upset about the loss as the daughter, maybe she knew she’d probably never use it. Or I could be reading too much into it.
Maybe if she’s lucky, a million nice people in Israel will give her a dollar.
June 11th, 2009 at 9:10 am
@orchid, @holly - I definitely would want a million dollars either way, but I can’t see sleeping on it for sure. I dunno I think a million bucks is definitely more “within reach” of the average person… inflation has made it have less of a punch. I mean, my parents’ house cost like $20,000 in the 1960s, so probably a million dollars seemed a lot more than it is today.
I can imagine an older retired person having near that amount, and living very comfortably off the interest from bonds or mutual funds or whatever it was invested in. And yes, they could travel and not worry about expenses as much and still have something to give the kids when they passed on.
June 12th, 2009 at 6:27 am
“I can imagine an older retired person having near that amount, and living very comfortably off the interest from bonds or mutual funds or whatever it was invested in.”
That’s a very good use of $1 million. It’s still doing something, even if it’s not being spent. Having it just sit in the house (while inflation depreciates it, and it is vulerable to theft, fire, etc.) is dumb.
June 12th, 2009 at 6:28 am
…er “vulnerable.” Sorry.