Posted on 10/27/2007 3:25:18 PM PDT by BGHater
Jeff Bidelman already was dragging a huge bag of old coins when he noticed a hole in the wall of a dilapidated Windber home.
“The woman said when she was a kid, there were always rumors that that’s where they threw money,” Bidelman said at his business, Rare Collectibles, in The Galleria in Richland Township.
Within minutes, Bidelman and the former residents’ daughter discovered that the rumors were true. Bidelman found himself literally wading in old, valuable coins.
“They think they are going to get (at least) $100,000,” Bidelman said. “I think they will probably get $200,000.”
The home had been unoccupied for almost 20 years, and the former family members who were living there have died, Bidelman explained. Their children asked Bidelman to look through the home for items of value.
“I was upstairs digging around,” Bidelman said. “I found a whole pile of coins.”
Scooping them into a plastic bag, he had to drag the heavy load and was starting downstairs when he noticed a hole in the wall.
“You don’t just have a hole in the wall,” he said.
He asked the late owners’ daughter to explain the hole, and she recalled the family rumors from her youth.
Bidelman quickly found the first-floor wall below the hole and began tapping near the floor. It sounded solid.
“When I got to about teeth level, I heard, ‘chink, chink,’” he said.
Bidelman opened the wall and the coins rushed out, “ballooning” under pressure.
Coins that have been sorted so far date from 1826 through 1964 and include large cents and seated Liberty dimes.
The coins have been removed from the old house and placed in secure locations.
So far, Bidelman has sorted and cataloged coins with a face value of about $8,500. Value to collectors will be much more, Bidelman said, adding he is already putting some items on the popular Internet auction site eBay.
There were several “large cent” coins, which were minted from 1793 to 1857. The face value is one cent, but Bidelman expects to get at least $20 each.
The family asked Bidelman not to identify them or the location of the home, especially after reading recent news reports of a woman who allegedly tried to burglarize a Windber home while the family was attending a funeral.
Good thing they kept the house!
Lavere Redfield they weren’t, but not bad!
Nice find. I found three rifles and a WW2 era 1911 just over the eaves in our attic soon after we moved in. My guess is that the previous owner stashed them up there and forgot about them. Oh, well finder’s keepers.
Let’s spread rumors about some old houses in Detroit...
;-)
Holy Sh!t! I actually moved to Windber for 5 years (girl, long story) but I never imagined that something lke this could be true! They’re very good people, the area just does NOT exude wealth. Good for them.
When My parents bought a house in the early 80’s I found a stack of nudie mags and a hand written list of about 40 names of women in a covered hole where the sewer pipe came up out of the foundation. I always wondered who those names were.
(Of course finders keepers and I never told my parents) :)
They’re going wish they kept quiet about their find. Expect the IRS to come a-knockin’.
I moved out of a house once and left Grandpa’s old Harrington and Richardson on the top shelf of the closet.
It was a top break .38 short (I think) and the new occupants called me to come retrieve the pistol.
I was pretty damn embarrassed.
Not unless they sell them! The face value of the coins is probably just a few dollars.
Yeah, but at least you got it back. I tried contacting the previous owner since the pistol was probably a family heirloom too, but he had just passed away, and his wife told me to keep the guns, she didn’t want the “nasty things”. Her loss. my gain.
I once found a rare cache of RC Cola bottles and got 2 cents a bottle, and I didn’t report it on my quarterly.
LMAO!!
I found a stack of Playboys in the cellar of our new house.
“They’re going wish they kept quiet about their find. Expect the IRS to come a-knockin’”
Yup. Like the U.S.S. Central America. Watch all the a$$holes come around with their hand out. U.S.S. Central America story linked below :
http://archive.observernews.com/stories/archives/history/salvage.shtml
They get a basis step-up if the owner is deceased.
The real puzzle will be whose property the coins were.
$8,500 face value. Mostly silver coins probably, would have a melt value around 10 times their face value in today dollars. But collectors will pay quite a bit more for certain dates and mintmarks.
He never spent much of anything and even plowed up his entire city lawn and planted a garden every year.
Every quarter the shop management would have to get on him for never cashing his checks because their books wouldn’t balance. He just horded them.
When he died back in the late 70’s his family that wound up with his old house found over 100K in bills in his walls!
Was it anything like the Harrington at above URL.
My favorite handgun porn site.:}
do you think they can argue they owe tax on the face value?
I found a stack of Playboys in the cellar of our new house.”
I imagine it’s a fairly common thing. I still have a stash at my parents house thats been sitting there for about 20 years!
Fix the pic.
More like 25 years.
“I still have a stash at my parents house thats been sitting there for about 20 years!”
Is the old man still claiming constipation after 2o minutes in the crapper?
Those slip, pantie or brassiere ads were my playboy.
My favorites were the brassieres that were so pointy you could either break balloons on them or could spin dishes on them like on the Ed Sullivan show.
Wonder Woman didn’t have squat on any of them.
Years ago we moved to a rented house and my brother and I found a naked picture of a fat woman with a Carmen Miranda fruit headress. It was quite disturbing but it was my first sight of a nude woman. My sister had a fit and ended up tearing it to shreds.
“When he died back in the late 70’s his family that wound up with his old house found over 100K in bills in his walls!”
I used to lurk on a metal detector site and one guy told of a story where a fellow detectorist gave up metal hunting and would go to the outskirts of towns and find the old houses that had been abandoned and would find odds and ends left behind. One Saturday morning he showed up at the local cafe and his friend was sitting in the lot with his car. He motioned to the guy to come over, opened up the trunk, showed him two suitcases stuffed with old bills and drove off into the sunset never to be seen again.
A fun story to whet the appetite - and perhaps its even true!
He was quite a nut with no real plan for anything other than hording cash for some unknown reason.
He was divorced and never spent a dime of his money. He had no will or any dreams that ever shared with anyone.
GGG ping?
30 years for me : )
“When he died back in the late 70’s his family that wound up with his old house found over 100K in bills in his walls!”
Nice catch in the late 70’s!
15K gross a year was pretty good money back then.
Sorry - no doubt yours is true, I was talking about the one I read on the internet.
“Mostly silver coins probably, would have a melt value around 10 times their face value in today dollars.”
....I noticed the coins were dated up to 1965....those dimes, quarters,halfs and dollars were 90% silver...in 1966 the govt. started debasing the coinage using silver clad copper....last week the exchange rate varied between 12 and 13 times face value....the coins could well go higher if sold later....gold is way up now and has been known to “pull” silver.
I see one major bullion buyer online paying $10.76 per dollar of face value right now. That’s the “melt” price apart from any collector value some coins may have.
For those that don’t know, $1000 face value pre-65 dimes, quarters and halves equal 725 ounces of silver when new.
Dealers typically allow for 715 ounces on account of wear on heavily circulated coins. Notice that four quarters or two halves don’t equal the content of a dollar - 770 ounces per $1000, a result of a kind of mint seignorage.
All of this is academic now, leading little kids to wonder why a dime is smaller than a nickle or a penny. Many adults don’t know either, presumably.
ping
I don’t know the IRS rules, but the coins are legal tender. Technically they could, for example, buy a dime’s worth of candy with the dime. Seems like the basis ought to be the face value. As they sell them for profit, they’ll have to pay taxes on what they make over and above face value.
I never thought of using a wall as a piggy bank before
I’m almost certain the IRS position is that the fair market value is the tax basis. A nice find for the heirs. Proof that “you can’t take it with you”, ( I’m just trying to keep it while I’m here, though).
I used to collect coins when I was a kid, rummaging through old pennies in change. My grandmother gave me a very worn silver dollar, that she had saved from the depression years. She explained, along with that dollar, what everyone went through in those years. That woman knew how to stretch money. The stories she and others have should make almost anyone shameful of how good we have it today.
But the “hole in the wall” folks would have done better if they had provided their heirs with say, Intel stock. The IRS would have been happier too.
“I once found a rare cache of RC Cola bottles ......
I once shot an elephant in my pajamas;
how he got there I’ll never know.”
Maybe because it’s 6 A.M., but your response and Groucho’s picture made me chuckle!
I’ve got to go out now and viaduct.
Your sister was right. Fat women wearing nothing more than a Carmen Miranda fruit headress can be trouble. Now I’ve never actually seen a fat women wearing nothing more than a Carmen Miranda fruit headress, but I’ve heard stories...
Well, then.......fair enough, honor satisfied. You aren't required to enlighten her about the hundreds of dollars each piece is worth.
My elderly uncle has had a Luger he brought home from the Big Show (he was in the Big Red One, his was an authentic war trophy, not a postwar pickup), that one day will go to the kids. I've given my cousins an idea what those guns were going for in fair-to-good condition in a fair-sized gun store in my home town, and that was 10 years ago now.
I was surprised to see Luger made an American edition in the 30's.....receiver stamp featured the superchicken from the Great Seal picked out in white, damn nice looking. Wonder if a Wehrmacht officer carried it during the War? Real surprise to see it alongside all the other special-issue models, in this or that caliber, of the basic Luger.
Sounds like an hour's idle fun cranking scenarios through Excel.
And so on.
Those coins are beautiful, it must be said. They are a reflection of the times and circumstances. Ancient Greek coins are another example. But at best (usually) they only remain static at some level with respect to purchasing power. That means a hell of a lot, finding an old checkbook inside the walls wouldn’t be quite the same thing. Worthless, in fact.
But there is no real capital appreciation - good stocks from good companies are the only way to fly. I have some money stashed and am waiting to buy when I think the time is right. Time waits for no man, though - Sometimes I ponder what it would be like to live forever, and realize as stupid as I am, I’m awfully lucky that I won’t!
Oh, well.
People sing the wisdom of buy-and-hold, but a person who bought the market, or a mutual fund, in 1969, had to wait 13 years to see any real appreciation, and while he waited he was under water with respect to his original investment.
Right now the market is very high and the smart money expects the market to roll over in 2009 anyway.....not because Hillary gets in, but coincident anyway.
It's really late to be investing in stocks. It's fairly late to be investing in energy or precious metals. In fact, I'd be hard put to say what is a value now. I'm holding existing positions, but those are positions I took years ago.
I wish I knew what to tell you to do, because that would answer a few questions of my own!!
Maybe time to start looking at real-estate investment trusts as they get marked to market and their yields go up? That arena's a disaster, but with every fresh downswing, the safety of the investment increases and your return rises.
Just something to think about. I do recommend you look up some leading financial-advice newsletters (Mark Hulbert on MarketWatch.com grades their performance records -- sort of like Consumer's Report) and get a good one with a multiyear record (more than five years) of success, latch onto it, and do exactly what the guy tells you to do, when he tells you to do it.
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