Where’d It Go?

Losing money is something that we hope never happens and we take safeguards to assure that this is the case. Most of us use the bank to store our money and we do feel confident that the banking system will take of it as it should. We do not think about keeping too much cash at our home because we fear it may be stolen. But one woman in Israel has taken it a step further and has recently thrown out an old mattress containing her entire life savings, almost $1 million dollars.

Waking up frantically the next day, the woman from Tel Aviv went on a search to attempt to recover her large sum of money. It is astounding to think that she actually forgot that the money was there—many would not be so forgetful. In this day and age of economic strife, it is hard to imagine forgetting such a large amount of money. She has so far looked in three different landfill sites with no success. Although we can see some humor in this situation, it is important to take a lesson from this scenario: banks exist for a reason and they facilitate the safe keeping of a very important asset, your money!

The woman’s reason for not storing the money in a bank is not only odd, but suspect. The money contained in the mattress is in US dollars, but she would not explain why that is. You do not see many large sums of money in US dollars in Israel, where the country’s currency is denominated in shekels. Not only that, but she claims to have had a bad experience with banks previously. With a million dollars at stake, working out any bank difficulties would be a high priority to ensure the safety of life savings.