One Million Dollars Down The Drain

by Silicon Valley Blogger on June 10, 2009

How to be a millionaire? How about trying to hold on to the money you’ve earned?

This would break your heart if it did happen to you (though there’s question of its veracity). I just read a story from Tel Aviv about this unfortunate woman who lost her mattress. She had been sleeping on the same old, ratty mattress for decades, and her daughter felt she would do her mother a favor by trading it in for something nice and new. What her daughter didn’t realize was that the old mattress housed her mother’s life’s savings. Cash padded its interior which amounted to a million dollars. There are apparently still people out there who literally keep their money in their mattress (there are much better places to keep your money safe). Although I scratch my head wondering a few things:

  • How do you know when you’ve got a million dollars stuffed in your mattress? It seems hard to account for that much money.
  • Can a mattress truly house all those bills?
  • Was the exchange rate taken into consideration? $1 million is equivalent to 3.928 million new Israeli shekels. Or do people store their life’s savings in dollars? Maybe.
  • When the daughter tossed the bed by the curb, didn’t she notice just how heavy it was? Lugging down a million dollars to the garbage heap just sounds like it would be so…. heavy.

To gain some idea about what exactly was thrown in the dump, let’s visualize a million dollars here:

personal property insurance
Image from the Huffington Post.

Could you really drag a mattress with this much money in it anywhere? You can read the details of the story here.


You’ll find more stories about money in this great list of articles from my blogging colleagues:

Personal Finance Articles

Recent Carnivals

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Categorized under: Banking & Money Management, Money Articles, Things Gone Awry

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{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }

1 Eric June 11, 2009 at 1:52 am

Sounds unbelievable to me too. Seems like it was exaggerated for an oversensationalized story.

2 Tom @ Canadian Finance Blog June 11, 2009 at 6:33 am

Thanks for the mention!

3 Manshu June 11, 2009 at 6:48 am

Its really sad and to think that there are several other people who bought bonds of huge car companies and now there savings are all gone is equally bad. When the bad times hit, no one is spared.

4 Silicon Valley Blogger June 11, 2009 at 7:06 am

Eric,
It sounds like it would be impossible, I agree. I can’t believe it made CNN news. Who knows what really happened? Makes for an interesting cautionary tale (fable?) though.

5 Todd @ The Personal Finance Playbook June 11, 2009 at 7:29 am

Thanks for the mention SVB! I, too, find that story very hard to believe. Like you said, who knows?

6 Annuity Quotes Guru June 11, 2009 at 1:59 pm

Yes, this story reeks of internet fodder. The weight alone would let you know you were throwing out something more than a mattress.

7 Frank Curmudgeon June 11, 2009 at 3:16 pm

This is certainly a too-cute-to-be-true story, but a mattress could easily have $1M in Benjamins in it without somebody noticing the weight. US Currency is 6 x 2.5 inches, so a single sheet of 8.5 x 11 paper is the equivilent of 6.233 bils, meaning that 10,000 of them are about 1600 sheets of paper, a little more than three reams. You could sneak that into a queen sized mattress and nobody carrying it would notice.

And look at the photo more carefully. Those bundles are each $5000, i.e. they hold 50 bills. There should only be 200 of them. Count the layers. It should be pretty obvious that the center of the pile is hollow.

Truth is, as anybody who has amassed a million will tell you, it’s just not that much money.

8 Harris June 12, 2009 at 12:00 am

Though it sounds too much, exaggerated as some have said, i just simply pull out the red line of the story that one should not put all things in one basket. or simply saying ‘don’t put all eggs into one basket.’

in business, investment is a matter of prudent. all business people will say ‘business diversification’ which simply means not to have only one income streams, but a long list of ways to invest money.

9 mattress June 15, 2009 at 6:53 am

So sad, if true.

That’s a big IF however, as you’ve pointed out some serious holes in the story.

I’ll stick with putting my money in the bank……..

10 Alex June 15, 2009 at 5:14 pm

I’m with Frank on this one. I think the real illusion to be uncovered here is just how much space a million dollars takes up. If you look closely at the image, you’ll notice that you can see the top of a black shelf just behind the first stack of bills. Also take into account that they are stacked in a way that maximizes the volume of the pile. I think Hollywood’s been tricking me.

Perhaps the money was why the mattress seemed so “ratty”. The daughter thought the stuffing was falling apart or something.

11 kosmo @ The Casual Observer June 18, 2009 at 9:22 am

I’m with Frank – it’s definitely possible, from a technical sense. As I heft the ream of paper on my desk … yeah, you could easily sneak the weight of three reams into a queen sized mattress. Queen mattresses are kind of heavy.

12 Ann June 29, 2009 at 8:38 am

It’s really hard to believe. But if that is true??? My heart would surely break. :-(

13 nick July 10, 2009 at 1:36 pm

One million U.S Dollars weighed in at 1100 pounds. Goes to show that the story is full of shit. I think they would have figured it out when they needed a forklift for a mattress.

14 Silicon Valley Blogger July 10, 2009 at 1:51 pm

Some of it was local currency, I wonder how much of that would make a difference in poundage. Yes, sounds fishy. Maybe the story tellers wanted the attention through this type of sensationalism. For the life of me, I can’t believe it would be make the “news” at all. And here I am propagating it, of course. Perhaps we should just segue into a discussion about the forlorn state of our “news” channels, shall we?

15 Andrew September 6, 2009 at 12:35 pm

I really feel sorry for that woman, no matter whether this very story is truth or fake, anyway, it’s not the problem of just single citizen, it is a problem of many people. Life of the retired in Israel is not that sweet. Certainly, Israel is rather developed country, developed in many aspects, including medicine, so on the medical level the old citizen are well maintained, but on the social one they are really not. They don’t get the pension from the national budget, they just get little sums of money accumulated during the years of their work, which they paid over to the Institute of National Insurance. Moreover the situation has worsened by the tough reforms held by the Finance Ministry, which increased the retirement age and decreased the pension size.

What I really don’t understand is how she could hide it from everybody, especially from her daughter…She slept during years on one and the same mattress without even causing even any suspicions?

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