A woman in Israel hid her life savings—she says nearly $1 million dollars—in her mattress. Her daughter bought her a new mattress as a surprise upgrade and threw it out. Dump employees are now searching on behalf of the family while security has been hired to keep out treasure hunters, but they don’t know which of the two city dumps it was taken to. We imagine it’s the one where the rats are all wearing tiny gold rings and toasting each other with little glasses of champagne.
The good thing about keeping your money in a bank is that it’s insured. If you’re not sure whether to trust the bank or credit union, look it up at Bankrate.com to see how it’s rated.
“Tel Aviv search for mattress containing $1M life savings” [CNN]
(Photo: oddsock and i’m george)
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There was a Spongebob episode just like this. I hope the giant guard worm doesn’t hurt anyone.
@sickofthis: That’s the first thing I thought of. Great minds think alike!
@Fett101:
Same here.
@sickofthis:
Damn, you beat me!
I love that episode.
@HogwartsAlum: Why is my code name worm bait?
@Lo-Pan: You guys aren’t bait. You’re “choice cuts”
@sickofthis:
Spongebob? Try Threes Company.
OK that’s only slightly more embarrassing than having Madoff steal your million dollar fortune. At least at the dump, there’s a small chance you’ll find you missing fortune.
@AcceleratedDragon: I still think they should let the shafted investors beat him like a pinata to see if their money comes out.
@U-235: UGH! I am so tired of the Madoff haters out there. Yes, he was a scumbag, but guess what? There are thousands of more like him out there doing the same thing everyday.
What I still don’t seem to understand is why people don’t see that most of these people would have lost the same amount in the latest “Market Adjustment” if they had just invested it in the Stock Market like everyone else.
I guess it’s all about having a face to go with your lack of good financial judgement.
@allnitecp: “Yes, he was a scumbag, but guess what?”
The the hell, dude. Madoff is a scumbag — you even admit it yourself — and yet … you are defending him? Why? Were you his boyfriend?
@allnitecp: …Wanna give me your life savings to invest? 8-11% return, guaranteed!
Great pic!
I don’t understand what this woman was thinking. There were obviously no exterior signs that the mattress contained anything so what if she got hit by a bus or something? The daughter would never know where her inheritance went and the million would be lost forever.
@Copernicus42: Not only that…but how do you forget about $1 million dollars? Once she needed a new mattress how did it not click that she is literally sleeping on money?
I hope she has fun looking for her money. That is complete incompetence.
@LegoMan322: It sounds like she didn’t want a new matterss, her daughter did the swap for her as a surprise.
@AlteredBeast: ahh…I think you would be correct according to the second sentence. : )
@LegoMan322: Her daughter bought the mattress as a surprise, as it says in the second sentence.
@Copernicus42: That’s why I always stop and check the bottoms of drawers if I see furniture on the side of the road. Them old people are sneaky, and didn’t trust banks. That’s crazy! I mean, banks will never fail. Right?
@SupremeCourtNominee_GitEmSteveDave: Ever find anything?
@Copernicus42: It’s called a will – you know, the thing that gets read after you die?
It’s amazing how decades of effort and self-sacrifice can be undone in mere moments. Lady Luck is a cruel bitch.
I’m calling shenanigans. She insisted that it was cash and shekels. Does anyone here realize the volume $1M USD takes up? In $1 bills it’d weigh just over a ton, and take up 39 cubic feet. In the best case, $100′s would occupy .39 cubic feet and weigh 20.4 pounds, but it’s unlikely that she had the optimal amount. Add in shekels, which are worth less than American currency, and I’m not buying the value reported. Not to mention the mattress had to, you know, have room for the coils and such.
Anyone wants to check my math: [wiki.answers.com]
@tedyc03: We have a call of Shenanigans! Please get your brooms while the call is investigate, thank you.
@SupremeCourtNominee_GitEmSteveDave: Nice. Now work-friendly shenanigans!
@Coles_Law: Wasnt that video always work friendly?
Or is it because it was a video, which by nature tends to announce “hello everyone! i am goofing off!”?
@Coles_Law: @MostlyHarmless: Well, it also cursed, which isn’t always safe for work. Now you can fill the voices in yourself, or just have the voices in your head dub it, like I do. Besides, YouTube ganked the original video. Next I’m doing the SouthPark episode.
@Trai_Dep: Huh?
@SupremeCourtNominee_GitEmSteveDave: Err, no animated GIFs that have more that 4,500 frames? Please?
@SupremeCourtNominee_GitEmSteveDave: @Coles_Law: I appreciate the work-friendly shenanigans!
@MostlyHarmless: Work friendly because it doesn’t require sound. My floor is a deathly silent place. And headphones are not an option.
@tedyc03: I didn’t see anywhere in the article that mentions American dollars or shekels, just that she hid $1 million. Where are you getting the currency information?
@pecan 3.14159265: What, do you think it could have been a personal check?
@Radi0logy: I’m not debating that she kept money inside her mattress, I’m just not seeing where the information about the specific currency came from. Shekels are coins – they weigh significantly more than dollar bills, but if they are in higher currencies ($2 shekel vs. $1 bill) the weight might not be so bad.
It’s understandable that the daughter wouldn’t suspect any increased weight…a queen sized mattress is extremely heavy, money or no money. Unless you haul mattresses every week, you’re not going to know precisely how much a mattress should weigh.
@pecan 3.14159265: You’d think if there was such a large amount of coins in it, you’d someone would’ve heard all the jingling.
@pecan 3.14159265: err… shekels are not just coins. Israel has bills too which go up to 200.
@jessi5000: Seriously. O_o
@pecan 3.14159265:
The sounds of hundreds/thousands of coins slapping together into a jingling waterfall when she lefted/turned it might have been a clue.
@pecan 3.14159265: Especially really old matresses are heavier than new ones.. All that crud (Skin, dust, dustmites, you know.. crud) adds weight to a matress over the years… I’d just think it was an old crappy matress, which it probably was.
@pecan 3.14159265: MSNBC has the article on their site as well: “Over the years, Anat’s mother had stashed away American dollars and Israeli shekels in her mattress, and now Anat had thrown away her life savings.”
@tedyc03: I thought the same. You’d think someone would notice a million dollars shoved into a mattress. Did the daughter just think it was extra-lumpy?
@tedyc03: I suspect that the old woman (a) has some issues regarding security/money, and possibly anxiety as well and (b) does not have any solid idea how much money was in that mattress. She’s probably comforted herself for years by thinking that there’s about a million dollars in there; there’s no telling how much it really was, although I am guessing that after years of hoarding it could’ve been quite a lot.
@tedyc03: While your math may be right, have you ever actually seen $1 million? In straps of 100′s it barely fills a briefcase. That could easily be hidden in a mattress, especially an old, heavy mattress.
Realistically, if she was shoving bills in the mattress in wads of various amounts, it would be heavier due to a larger quantity of bills. But if it’s not obvious where the slits to shove the bills are, the mattress could quite easily be thrown away, filled with money.
We’ll see how this turns out I suppose…
@tedyc03: Shekels are availible in bills, so she might have had the larger NIS200 notes. My first thought was $100 bills, though, since they are not only easy to get in Israel (at just about any bank branch) but were also preferred back when Israel’s currency was very volatile. People in Russia and Eastern Europe used to have a fondness for $100 bills, and a lot of older Israelis are from that part of the world, so it may have been the woman’s standard investment practice.
Also, a lot of people outside of the U.S. don’t use mattresses with springs. If this was a foam type mattress, she could have been replacing the foam with bills.
here’s hoping a homeless family found some comfort in its deluxe padding & found a way to finally move out from under the freeway.
The woman saves up another million dollars and tucks it away in her mattress, the daughter decides that the mattress is too lumpy and uncomfortable for her mother and throws it out, the mother saves up another million in the new mattress, the daughter can’t believe how uncomfortable her mother’s mattress is . . .
It’s a never ending cycle.
@HiPwr: lol
And to think, during the banking crisis she was probably all like, “Yeah, panic fools…my nut is safe and sound.”
Of course, this could be a brilliant prank to get hundreds of people walking around in garbage chasing nothing.
I wonder if the security is provided by the publicly financed dumps (?) And if they’re having to compensate for having city employees hunt for their mattress.
(Mostly I’m just bitter and jealous because I think it would be super fun to hunt in a dump for a million-dollar mattress….)
@Where The Mild Things Are: That sounds like a premise for a new Fox Reality show. Contestants have to hunt through a dump to find the one piece of furniture or garbage with the prize money. I’d watch it, anyway…
@Ally Hill: Then they’d have to marry a horse or something. I mean, you did say Fox…
@secret_curse: Or consummate the marriage. As you said, it is Fox.
@Ally Hill: Isn’t that the Bachelor, or Rock of Love, or Falvor of love, etc…
@Where The Mild Things Are: Ha! As long as you found it. Otherwise it would just be a lot of trudging around in soiled diapers.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say this has a bit more sinister plot..
I am guessing the daughter found the “stash” of money in the mattress and concocted this as a way to steal the money from her mother.
Its really convenient the mattress was replaced with a brand new one and the old one disappears completely..
@thebluepill: Er. What?
@thebluepill: Definitely a possibility, sad to say.
@thebluepill: Yeah..it is in cash and probably untraceable.
@thebluepill: What, they don’t have fast-moving trains in Israel?
@thebluepill: Much cleaner to get rid of the mother, since the daughter won’t be able to easily spend it, unless she likes to gamble or something
@thebluepill: You know, this never occurred to me until you said it.Now I am thinking that this is exactly what happened. really, who goes out and buys their mom a new mattress as a “surprise”.
i found the mattress! madoff’s been sleeping on it all this time in jail.
But we don’t need banks. Banks are evil!
@Unsolicited Advice: Unfortunately, so are daughters-in-law.
I prefer to skip the matress alltogether and sleep on “a big pile of money with many beautiful ladies.”
@BenderRodriguez: Yeah, but then the garbage men will end up keeping the ladies.
@Trai_Dep: Hmmm, that would be an ideal arrangment
@morlo: It certainly is ideal. Just ask Ranier Wolfcastle.
If it’s really $1 million, it’s kind of stupid to tell the dump employees what you’re looking for. They probably found it on the first try and are buying vacation homes with cash.
In recent years, interest rates have been outpaced by inflation, so most deposit accounts have *lost* value. Makes you want to bury gold in the yard.
@brianary: or, uh, keep it in a safe deposit box.
Do we know it wasn’t left on the corner and collected by a scavenger? Someone may have just taken home a fortune!
I have little sympathy for people who put money in coffee cans and mattress and then loose them. If you have that much money put at least SOME of it in a bank.
When I read the article, it said that the daughter came out to find that the mattress had been taken by trash collectors.
No one has mentioned this yet, but there’s a good chance that a neighbor or needy person took the mattress if it was still in relatively good shape. It could be in the neighborhood, under her nose the entire time while they search the dump. I’m sure – I hope – she’s considered this possibility.
@Cristy Zamora: Do you know ANYONE who has taken a second hand mattress and not had some problems?
@Cristy Zamora: I was about to mention this myself. I am surprised that no-one seems to be considering that the mattress never made it to the dump.
Have any of the trash workers recently quit?!?!?
@eb0nyknight: I believe the dumps take in over 2500 tons of trash a DAY. That’s a lot to pile on and things disappear quick.
@SupremeCourtNominee_GitEmSteveDave: Yes, I understand that it “probably” is lost in the dump. But I think it odd that no one seems to acknowledge the “possibility” that it never made there in the first place.
I am sure they are actually investigating that angle, but I though it odd that it hasn’t been mentioned.
At least she claims that who ever finds the stash gets to keep 1/3, and another 1/3 will go to a childrens charity.
And I don’t recall in the news interview that her daughter was involved, she claimed she herself forgot about they money when she replaced the mattress.
this is an opportunity for us all to talk to the old people in our lives and get details that matter.
like a poster pointed out, had this woman been hit by a bus or just died a natural death that mattress would have been thrown out.
So get your grands or parents to “trust” banks and document those collectables and tell you about accounts and MAKE A WILL.
When my stepmother died, I went to the house, looked under her mattress (above the box springs), and found 45 bucks. Gave it to dad. (To clarify, they had separate beds).
When dad died, I looked under the mattress and under the bed as well. Found nearly $250 – amazingly, all of it coins.
But I never thought to look INSIDE the mattresses. Damn!
“We imagine it’s the one where the rats are all wearing tiny gold rings and toasting each other with little glasses of champagne.”
Super cute!
Mattress is definitely not the safest place to hide money, what about a fire or flood? It’s not just the good natured daughter you have to worry about. I keep several thousand dollars in a fire safe box instead.
(I’m on the run)