Finding Treasure

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After I retired in 2008, my wife and I decided to start walking for exercise. We walked 3 to 5 miles a day for almost a year. One of the things we did while walking was to search for treasure. It truly is amazing what people leave lying around the street. We have found silverware, tools, knives, jewelry, a whole assortment of trinkets, and money. We would take our treasure home with us and place it in a big jar. On one of our walks, we found a lid for the jar. There’s a chicken on top of the lid that appears to be from some type of canister set. We moved up on a hill and adopted a stray dog. The dog wasn’t leash trained and we didn’t want him following us through the busy streets, so now we work out at home, and don't do much walking. But, whenever we’re out, if we happen upon a worthy piece of treasure it still comes home to it’s new home in the jar. That is especially true for money. We’ll come out of restaurants and stores and find coins on sidewalks and in parking lots. That money is placed separate usually in my wife’s purse and always gets placed in the jar. We find that in finding money, we can judge the economy. When the economy went south, we pretty much quit finding anything. Lately, it must be getting better, because we are starting to find the money again. This morning, I found two one dollar bills in the hardware store parking lot. My guess is that it popped out of someone’s pocket as they pulled out their keys. When I got home and told my wife of the find, she watched closely to ensure I placed it in the jar. Maybe she doesn’t trust me. Anyway, I got to wondering just how much is in that two and a half year old treasure jar. So, I emptied it out, counted the money, and then put it all back in the jar. Here’s what we got:
one $10 bill, three $1 bills, 16 quarters, 74 dimes, 29 nickels, and 389 pennies totaling $30.14. At today’s high interest rate of maybe 1%, we would have had to have had about $1,200 in the bank for those whole 2 ½ years to get that kind of a return. Not bad for finding treasure and it’s not even buried.
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