Finding a stash of money in your attic after closing - What would you do? (escrow, inspector)
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The question is, if this is a really old house, and the prior owner didn't live there forever, whose money is it to give it back to. If it was an old wedding album, or something, that is easy to figure out, but cash, not so much.
I'd probably contact the prior owner and tell them I found something of value in the attic, and ask if they might have forgotten something. Maybe describe the bag and see if they know the contents, or something. If they said they never used the attic, then see if I could find out who the prior owner was. If I couldn't track them down after a reasonable good faith effort, then MAYBE I could justify keeping it.
This was my initial thought as well. I'd probably do the same as above - ask the seller if they left something important in the attic, and if they can't recall or describe it, then ask if they have contact information for the folks THEY bought the house from, and continue on until I had no other trails to follow.
I would have simply gave the guns to the police at that point and said, here...... you deal with them.
That occurred to my parents after the fact... but the police never offered to take them. At that point, they had set up a wiretap on my parents phone to record any threatening calls and they didn't care about the previous owners getting anything back, it had turned into a criminal investigation. Kooky people.
At any rate, the guns have been with me for the past 5 years.
This would be a dilemma. How do you know who the money belongs to if there were multiple owners of the property? Lets say the second owners of the house left it behind and you're buying from the fourth owner. How do you approach them without telling them too much and having them lie and say that it's their money? If you're the second owner of the house then it's a no brainer. Return it. We joked with the nephew who inherited our house and sold it to us that if we found any money hidden away it was ours. He agreed. Sweet. Did we find any? Nope. If we did we would have kept it.
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