MONEY HIDDEN IN HOMES

After their father died in 2021, Susan Camp and her brother cleaned out his home — and inadvertently threw out $5,000 in cash he had wrapped in aluminum foil and stashed in the freezer. (Luckily, they later retrieved it.)

It might not be under the mattress, but for people who stumble across a small fortune after an elderly relative dies or moves to a nursing home, uncovering such unexpected wealth — technically part of a person's estate — can bring complications and even conflict.

Oftentimes, members of older generations perceive keeping cash, gold or other valuables at home as safer than keeping them in a bank, experts say. I think this is more common for the baby boomer generation and older, said Mark Criner III, senior trust strategist for Baird Trust in Scottsdale, Ariz. When you get to that generation, there was a real mistrust of financial institutions, he said, referring to people old enough to remember the Great Depression and the bank failures of the 1930s.

While throwing cash in the trash is a very real risk of keeping money at home, it is far from the only one, advisers say. Valuables kept in the home can be stolen, destroyed by a disaster like a fire, or surreptitiously appropriated by a family member.

Things have a way of disappearing from the home, especially when you have existing family drama or a dispute, said Alvina Lo, chief wealth strategist at Wilmington Trust, a subsidiary of M&T Bank.

This potential for tension among survivors can arise even if no misappropriation takes place, experts say.

Over time, experts predict that people's keeping cash at home will diminish as the collective memory of the Great Depression fades, and the use of digital banking continues to increase.

While this is good news from a financial-planning perspective, people who have seen this dynamic play out say it would also spare survivors the painful emotions these discoveries can cause.

Finding, for instance, hundred-dollar bills secreted amid items that would normally be donated or discarded is stressful for surviving loved ones because it necessitates a much lengthier, painstaking process of removing personal effects from a home. The families are grieving and it's very hard for them, said Ms. Volpe, who is a real estate broker in Hyde Park, N.Y.

To read the complete article (subscription required), see:
When the Money Is Under the Mattress. Or in the Freezer. Or a Shoebox. (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/08/business/cash-at-home-retirement.html)

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