
A woman in California described herself as “flabbergasted” that her bank flat-out refused to accept a six thousand dollar cash deposit. The woman says she only has the cash pile because she misplaced it four years ago.
CBS Sacramento reports that sixty-six-year-old Mary Venegas set down an envelope which housed the $6,000 cash stack while she was in her back yard in 2020, and then promptly forgot where exactly she’d put it.
Four years of searching for the cash—which she had originally planned to use to pay her tax bill—eventually came to an end when she found the envelope on the ground where it had been kicked under some cardboard. After such a long search, the discovery was a major relief.
However, when Venegas went to the local Bank of America branch—where she had loyally banked for decades—the bank refused to accept it because of the tattered condition of some of the bills.
Venegas was floored.
As Venegas now lives on a fixed income, she had hoped to use the money to pay her water bill, for which she is currently in arrears. Venegas said that she does not like carrying debts at all, and that she was looking forward to the weight of the obligation being lifted off her shoulders.
The United States Treasury Department has a program for exchanging tattered bills for crisp ones, but only if the fragment being submitted is half of the original bill or less, or if the bill is damaged in such a way that its denomination is unclear. Not only does Venegas’s cash stash not qualify under those rules (every bill is intact, and its value is clearly visible), but the process offered by the Treasury Department takes anywhere from six months to three years to complete.
Venegas told local reporters that she is hesitant to go down that route, as she is worried that at her age she may not live long enough to get the money back from the Treasury.
Does that sound fair to you?