Back in the 1930s, my husband had a great uncle who owned a farm in Nebraska. He was ill tempered and slovenly. His wife and children finally moved to town. When he died at the age of 89, his daughters were left with the task of selling the farm and cleaning out his property. One of them remembered her father burying a coffee can out back. After poking around the yard, they found numerous coffee cans stuffed with cash–which enabled them to live more comfortable lives than they had anticipated. The recent failure of the Silicon Valley Bank in California gives me a new respect for Uncle George’s peculiar savings habits. Should we stash cash in coffee cans?
In my hometown, there was a grocery store on every corner. Mostly owned by immigrants from Middle Eastern countries. Our local grocer was crafty and secretive. During World War II, he sold black market meat and coffee to those who could afford it. Years later, I worked for an oilman, who managed to convince this same person to invest in the drilling of oil wells. Apparently the grocer didn’t write a check; his money reportedly came out of “greasy coffee cans.”
People still distrust banks, but not the way they did after the Great Depression.. Things got things straightened out in 1933, and people began opening bank accounts. If you were running any kind of business, you really had no choice if you wanted to purchase inventory and pay bills. The average middle class person mostly lived from paycheck to paycheck, so there wasn’t much to lose if their bank would happen to fail.
But the Covid stimulus money enabled many who kept their jobs to accumulate a sizable amount of cash. They weren’t inclined to keep it hidden away in drawers and coffee cans. The banks are insured, right? There’s nothing to lose. That’s what most of us believed. Many didn’t realize that if you were lucky enough to have more than $250,000 in one bank, that extra money was not insured.
Now, we have business people who were too short sighted to spread their money around. Most weren’t old enough to remember when banks failed and people lost everything. I don’t know what will happen now. Will savers panic and cause a run on banks everywhere? Hopefully not. Meanwhile, you have to wonder. Should we stash our cash in coffee cans?