If you’ve ever bought a piece of used furniture before, you realize that it is necessary to be a little picky. You want to make sure that it fits in well with the design and the available space, but you also want it to be clean.
That is how a group of friends felt when they went to the Salvation Army store to pick up a used couch. They were enjoying it, watching a movie together but they felt crinkles in the side pillows and wondered what they were.
According to one of the students, they opened up the couch and it had bubble-wrapped envelopes inside. He said there were two or three of them and he ripped them out and they were ‘freaking out’ because they contained a lot of $100 bills.
After making that discovery, they went on to tear apart the entire couch and in the end, they had discovered $41,000.
Another one of the friends said that they kept counting and more and more money was available so they were getting excited. They were thinking about buying a car for their mother and a boat.
All of that joy he took a turn when they found one of the envelopes had a woman’s name on it. Another one of the students said that the entitlement went away quickly after they found the name because they didn’t earn the money.
They got their parents involved to find the owner of the fortune and the parents told the children not to let anyone else know because the money could be stolen.
Eventually, a match to the name was found in the phone book and one of the parents called her.
The parent said: “I’m like ‘I found something that I think is yours and she’s like ‘what?!’ And I’m like ‘I found a couch’ and then she’s like ‘oh my God I left a lot of money in that couch.’
Some friends of the older woman said that her sick husband had given her the money before he died so that she would have some money after he passed.
She didn’t know where to put the money, so it was hidden under the couch in her room. For 30 years, she kept saving money in the couch and not that long ago, she had surgery on her back and was in the recovery center.
The kids bought her a new couch while she was there and the old couch was sent to the Salvation Army.
The funny thing is, the students said that the couch was ugly and smelled but it was the only one that fit the right dimensions for the living room.
In the end, the students don’t feel bad about doing the right thing and they are even going to have dinner with the old woman and her family after giving the money back.