Just to be a twunt
The Bank of England doesn't issue £100 notes. they only go up to £50. There are some Scottish and Northern Irish £100 notes.

I used to work in a bank branch and yes filling the cash machine is "just like filling a photocopier" as the YTS guy in the old Barclay's advert used to say. Except nobody ever got killed for a ream of A4.
(wooly, Sat 24 Jun 2006, 11:43, Reply)

Actually, it's funny you should ask about large sums of cash
as my late employer, Dr Adada Muhammadu, had received TWENTY-FIVE MILLION US DOLLARS in cash shortly before the US invasion of Iraq. He was accidentally killed in fighting last year and since then I have been the sole custodian of this money, every one of Dr Muhammadu's relatives having died five years ago in a bizarre tangerine-hurling accident. I now need urgently to move this money our of Iraq and know that you, trusted sir (or madam), will be able to help in return for 50% of the money. Please send me your contact details urgently, but keep this in absolute confidence until the transaction is complete.

With blessings on your doughnuts,

Dr Olembe Olembe, Baghdad.
( Olembe Refuses to write in this space, Sat 24 Jun 2006, 10:49, Reply)

Last week...
...I went out with a big wad of Euros to buy eleven French impressionist paintings that I'd wanted for a long time. Afterwards, I noticed I had just 0.1 Euros left, but then I reflected that at least I had more Monet than cents.
( Olembe Refuses to write in this space, Sat 24 Jun 2006, 7:48, Reply)

Not a lot
I managed an icecream kiosk for the leisure centre I worked for one summer. They trusted me enough to sort orders, stockcheck, count and bring back the day's earnings on me bike, so it could be put in the safe at the centre about a mile away. The most I ever had stuffed in my backpack to cycle back was about £1300 (it was a hot day, people buy shitloads of extortionately priced icecream on hot days). Needless to say, an 18 year-old tired, thirsty and poor lad is never an honest one. Every days earnings was down by about £20, and I always had a hangover the next day.
(A Good Egg, Sat 24 Jun 2006, 2:55, Reply)

The most cash I ever had on me was
about 15 years ago when I went back packing across Europe. I'd earned about £400 picking grapes in the south of France, travelled through northern Italy and got a ferry trip from Venice to Izmir, in Turkey. It was a Turkish ship so it made sense at the time to change what money I had left (about £250) into Turkish Lira, making me an instant millionaire.

So I board the ferry, secure in the knowledge that my cash was safely stowed in my money belt. Bit of a surprise was that the cash wasn't accepted on board - I had to buy ship's Deutchmarks from the purser's office at a pretty poor exchange rate, and what I received was just pieces of paper with "5 DM", etc. stamped on them.

Second surprise came when I arrived at passport control in Izmir and found there was a £5 visa charge... that had to be paid in Sterling or other hard currency. I've been on a Turkish boat for 3 days with only Turkish cash, I've just landed in Turkey and at no point has anyone accepted their own bloody cash for anything!

I started to sweat a little when I found that the only beaurau de change in the port had already closed and was trying to arrange an escort to a bank when one of the customs guys took pity and changed the money into Sterling for me (not sure when he got the £5 note from though). The exchange rate that time wasn't too punitive and I was just happy to be allowed into the country.

Didn't make up for the mad Dutch bloke I sat next to on the boat though.
( S tr app y, Sat 24 Jun 2006, 1:30, Reply)

Not exactly carried...just handled
I used to work for B&Q (A diy store for those that don't know) on the checkouts. I served a customer one day that had placed an order. Total cost was about 6 and a half grand!!!....and he paid cash!!!...in 20's!!!!

We were supposed to check all notes under a UV light for forgeries. There was no way I was going to check all of those (it was about 15 minutes before closing). They also had this stupid rule about making sure that the notes were the right way up when put into the till with the queens head on the front. Stuff that....it would have taken me all night.

I just counted it to make sure it was all there...took ages....miscounted three times and had to start again...lol...and stuffed it in the till and gave the customer his change.

In case you're wondering....I did get ideas while I was there...I never did anything though...i'm too honest.

Now I think of it..I should have...bastards sacked me anyway for discount card fraud...which wasn't my fault.

I was also once pushing the floats from the tills down to the cash office after we had closed so a manager could put them in the safe.

Got to the cash office....just outside it....and one of the floats tipped over...spilling over £200 in change onto the floor...oops...took ages to pick up.

I need to go to the hospital...my cherry just popped and it's bleeding.
(csc2ya also uses this name on xbox live, Sat 24 Jun 2006, 1:27, Reply)

$20,000 US.. mostly in singles.
Thursday, August 14, 2003, the date of what would come to be known as the famous 2003 North America blackout.

I was on the road, in my old job as an arcade technician, and head of a crew of three. We were doing some work in several locations the company had in New Jersey, repairing machines, counting coins, replenishing the stores' change, and bringing the stores' cash receipts for the week back to the main office on Long Island, New York, which also happens to be where I live.

Fast-forward a few hours and a few miles, and we're on our way back to Long Island. At some point while we were on the road, the power went out. We were on a long stretch of parkway with no traffic signals, so we didn't notice until we hit New York City, and as we proceeded to the Bronx to drop the first of our number off at her place, we realized that the power had been out for some time. Our company-issued mobile phone had no signal, so we continued home to Long Island. We found the traffic surprisingly light, but of course the whole thing was new to us. The rest of the Northeastern United States had already been dealing with the situation for two hours. (We might have been less ignorant had we been listening to the car's radio rather than a cassette, but I digress.) Eventually, our phone caught some service, enabling us to check on our families and get in touch with our boss, who informed us that everyone in the company was being sent home. Good news for them, but bad news for us, who had been planning to unload several thousand of the company's dollars from the company car's trunk into their safe.

I no longer remember exactly how much cash it was, but on a typical Jersey run I believe we usually came back with anywhere from $10,000 to $20,000, more during Summer when the arcade trade is busiest. This was the peak of Summer, so I'd guess we had at least $20,000, possibly $25,000, mostly in single dollar bills, in a pile of canvas money bags. If you've ever seen stereotype bank robbers in movies running away with canvas money bags emblazoned with big "$" signs, you know the bags I'm referring to. In reality they don't have the "$", but they often have the name and address of the bank they came from.

As ranking officer in that group, I was going to be expected to take responsibility for these bags of the company's cash, and keep them safe in my own house until things blew over. I was not at all pleased with the idea - I love blackouts and would be damned if I was going to miss out on enjoying one just to watch a pile of the bosses' money. Besides, everyone was freaking out. The Nazi Taliban from the Bad Part of Town could have shown up to loot my house, or my cats might have urinated on it, or worse. So I managed to get hold of my supervisor, and just before his phone battery died I called in pretty much every favor he owed me (and a few he didn't,) and convinced him to meet me at my place and pick up the cash.

(As a service to myself, you readers, and my potential burglars, I must point out that I no longer have that type of job, and handle nobody's cash but my own meager scrapings nowadays.)

The other tech and I arrived at my slowly darkening house just before sunset. We piled the money bags into a corner of my living room, and he left. It was weird - as most honest people who handle large amounts of money at work will tell you, you stop really seeing it as currency after a while. You get used to the fact that it's not your money, and it just becomes an abstract thing you deal with at work. However, staring at this pile of cash in my own increasingly dark living room while listening to increasingly unsure radio reports, and needing to keep all the doors and windows open in an attempt to vent a house with no fans or air conditioning on a hot Summer night, I was forcefully reminded what I had. The highest point of the pile was half as tall as me, and thanks to my lousy night vision and my overactive imagination, the pile seemed to slowly spread out toward into the middle of the room. As time passed and passed, I cared less and less for the situation. There were no real lights, but my mind kept throwing a spotlight on the cash, and I couldn't see much else. Very film noir.

A couple of hours later, my supervisor showed up, and we unloaded the cash into his trunk in the pitch dark night. I couldn't resist the urge to hum the "Mission: Impossible" theme while we did so. He left on a 45 minute drive over unlit highway to his place (which I believe ended up taking him about 3 hours,) I felt amazingly relieved, and my sister and I got some flashlights and left to do some nighttime blackout exploring.
( Rob T Firefly talked, like, William Shatner, on, Sat 24 Jun 2006, 1:06, Reply)

$100,000 of the Russian Government's money
My company does dull financial services stuff which includes the occasional rating of the Central Securities Depository of various countries. These are basically places that keep safe the shares and bonds for the entire country. We went to Moscow to rate a Russian depository and were taken to see the vault, first passing through various identity checks, x-ray machines, airlock-style capsules etc. - very James Bond! The vault was basically the entire basement of the building. In one room were the certificates for all of the government bonds of the Russian Federation - many, many millions' worth.

Apart from all of the armed guards, security cameras, thick steel doors and walls etc. it looked like any other drab Russian office: several rooms, some desks, lots of filing cabinets. Our guide opened a filing cabinet drawer and handed me a single sheet of paper which turned out to be a bond certificate worth $100,000. There were dozens of these filing cabinets in the room, all stuffed with these certificates, some even worth $200,000.

Funnily enough, the armed guards weren't too impressed with my pantomime of slipping the certificate into my pocket... It was quite an experience being among so much concentrated money in a real-life fuck-off Russian government vault, even if there wasn't a hope in hell of getting hold of any of it!
( numberbruncher - correct by nature, Sat 24 Jun 2006, 0:48, Reply)

Ha, my kind of question.
I used to work at a bank. Once in the middle of the day, we ran out of 100s (yeah, weird, I know, a bank running out of 100s), so my supervisor and I had to make a cash trade with another bank down the street.

Nothing more unnerving than walking down the block with over a hundred grand in 50s, to make a trade for 100s, then walking back. Good thing I was in a small town at the time.

I remember when we used to have to count the cash parcels in the vault. It would take a couple hours, and our hands would be black. I hate money sometimes, ugh. But loading the ATMs was fun too. 40 grand got loaded into those bad boys.
(chaoticmatter, Sat 24 Jun 2006, 0:36, Reply)

When I was younger my parents took my brother and me to Blackpool,
one day when scrambling along the beach, my brother and I found a twenty pound note. We promtly ran off to the arcade and exchanged it for 1,000 two pence pieces. We hadn't been playing the machines long when we hit the jackpot, a fountain of two penny pieces flooded from the little machine. Ecstatic, we couldn't believe our good fortune and shovelled the coins into our pockets. We felt like billionaires as we wandered back to our hotel, big grins plastered on out faces and our trousers falling down from the weight in our pockets.
( Fluffy elephants, Sat 24 Jun 2006, 0:14, Reply)

Mr Whippy.
One summer I was delivering icecream to various sweet shops, garages and corner shops. Some of the accounts were cash, and I'd collect £50 here, £100 there. One shop was stocking up for the Whitsun BH, and they ordered half a van full. £6000+, most of it in £1 coins. In carrier bags. The next shop had the rest, and this time it was in £20s, £4K+. In a carrier bag.

In my courier days, I carried a bearer cheque (no name, just the amount and signature) for £129,000. Only found out when the recieving bank opened the envelope.
(all my scars face forward possesses 2.5% of a hyperalloy combat chassis, Sat 24 Jun 2006, 0:04, Reply)

Moving to the USA
When ex-hubby and I moved here, instead of doing the sensible thing and opening a bank account in the US, then transferring the money electronically from the UK, we decided to cash out 9,000 pounds, exchange it for $14,500 and carry it on the plane and through customs.......we even declared it! The customs guy told us to put $10,000 on the form, as you cannot bring more than that cash into the country.

I always cash my paychecks before putting them in the bank so I have a tendency to carry $1500 around for a day or 2 every week.
( Batshitmentalist is sane for once, Fri 23 Jun 2006, 23:41, Reply)

Being a poor student
I periodically go into my overdraft, which my parents believe is a Bad and Terrible Thing that means you are in moral danger. So this means when I come home from uni, I have to dip into the money my gran left me when she died.

And this means I'm carrying upwards of £300 through my chav-infested home town till I can drop it in the bank. And even then I'm always convinced the teller thinks I'm a drug dealer because I don't look like the sort of person who carries that amount of money on them.
( Maladicta, Fri 23 Jun 2006, 23:04, Reply)

ummm...
£620 to buy a guitar. such a nice guitar...
(biggiantmat, Fri 23 Jun 2006, 23:02, Reply)

I was 12...
and my Grandad gave me 2 gold medallion things which I decided I wanted to sell to buy more video games or similar.

Found the best deal at a charming place in one of the rougher areas of Nottingham. Walked up there with my 5'1" mother and exchanged the medallions for £2000, given to me in fives and tens!

As we walked towards the bank we heard a smash of glass behing us and the same shop had just been broken into! We kept walking calmly to the bank only to realise they were closed for lunch so we sort of sat around in a coffee shop waiting to deposit it. We both felt a bit uneasy.
(Mr Ikasu is not japanese, Fri 23 Jun 2006, 21:07, Reply)

not that much
i didnt carry much money but i had £100 in pound coins, about £20 in silver and £5 in pennies. the shops were thrilled when i was stood there counting out about 60 pound coins.
(minidave666 i am minidave, but am i really minidave?, Fri 23 Jun 2006, 21:03, Reply)

5 billion german mark
I once had some old mark notes from 1920's hyperinflation period.
There are much larger notes than that, though.

In real money I once carried, for work purposes, a 5 digit sum of USD into a country with certain laws against that sort of thing.
(dulff, Fri 23 Jun 2006, 20:40, Reply)

I am a student (read : I am a cheap bastard)
Therefore any money I have is converted almost immediately into the much more useful currency of alcohol.

However, after a night of epic proportions [in terms of amounts of alcohol drunk], I discovered I had missed my local YF (Youth Fellowship, teenage sunday school, basically) 's annual meeting. They'd also texted me, saying "Want to be treasurer next year? If you don't reply we'll assume it's a yes".

Bearing in mind I had little control over my legs in the morning and tiny precise movements like text messages were out of the question, I realised I'd been shackled with it.

So a couple weeks later I recieve the gubbins that comes with the post [which is to say a tin of change, and semi-control over the YF's bank account]. The tin contained £60 in assorted coins, which always proved useful when I needed cash for the bus in the morning / for a breakfast pint.

Anywho, eventually we get round to the big fundraiser [a pantomime], and I realise not only do I have to sell tickets on the night, and be the dame, but combine the two and sell tickets whilst in a dame outfit.

End result - £997 in cash [and £6 in cheques], all in a shortbread tin in my car that doesn't lock due to my cheapskatedness in fixing it. For a week. As I kept 'forgetting' to go to the bank [read : needed the change for pints].

Eventually fate caught up with me though, I had to produce end-of-year accounts, and had exact amounts from the panto written down. Turns out I'd "liberated" £130 out that tin over a couple months.

So I had to get an overdraft so the charities would get their money and everyone would be happy and I wouldn't go directly to the lowest circle of hell. And I ended up carrying £990 in cash, mostly in £1 and £2 coins, in a beaten up shortbread tin, through my town.

*witty end comment here*
(basstard, Fri 23 Jun 2006, 20:34, Reply)

Child labour
When I was at school I used to work Saturdays at my dad's cash and carry business. The goods were scanned in at one point and then the customer had to go to a specially secure cash office by the exit to actually pay. The cash office had CCTV, security glass, big locks, as you might expect for a place where people might be spending a few hundred to a few thousand quid at a time.

What never made any sense to me was that towards the end of the day, the takings from the cash office were taken to one of the back room offices to be counted and put in the safe. Which meant it had to be carried across the public warehouse floor. Who do you get to carry about £30,000 in heaps of various notes and coins across the warehouse floor in a little cardboard tray? Well, why not the boss's school-age daughter? It was kind of fun, and I'm afraid I was the sort of child that never even thought of pocketing some.
(shermarama, Fri 23 Jun 2006, 17:40, Reply)

Huge bundles of cash
I work for a large Australian travel company and regulary carry large sums of money round to the local bank. One Tues after the bank holiday I remember carrying round over £100,000 in several bags, all £50's, £20's and £10 notes. Needless to say I looked like a right fat bastard with all that "padding" around my stomach. Mexico it almost was for me.............
(grazer is sick of looking at houses, Fri 23 Jun 2006, 17:34, Reply)

Bought a new car (in 1999)
Went between garage forecourts with £10k in an envelope in 20's looking for a Black 2 door coupe.

One was a car supermarket place that had a Honda Prelude 2.2 vtec up for £8k

took it out, loved it, stupid arse wouldn't budge on the price, no deal, nothing. It had 3 months tax and 2 month MOT on it and wouldn't knock it down, or take the 8k if he Taxed and MOT'd it, twunt

Offered him this on spot, but the stupid twunt wanted to screw people on the interest payments on an HP payment i reckoned. they're bust now

The suited salesmen in the offical Ford dealership over the road bent over backwards an knocked £2k off the price of a £12 1.7 Black Puma coz i offered the £10k cash there an then, cool*


(* Think there was some tax incentive to cut price it for cash i reckon)
(1_not_so_careful_owner, Fri 23 Jun 2006, 17:27, Reply)

250 grand in a bin bag
I went into a bank in Vietnam to change some travellers cheques. 60 dollars into Vietnamese Dong makes you feel like a millionaire.

My bubble was burst when the bloke next to me took 10,000 dollars (US) out of a bin bag. And another and another and another and another and another....

When he had 100,000 dollars on the counter, he was almost hald way through his sack of cash. He said that the quarter of a million was burning a hole in his mattress so he thought he would let the bank pay him to look after it.

The poor sods in the bank had to check every note by hand for forgeries. Must have taken hours.

And how did he get the money? I wish I knew.
(blairslovechild, Fri 23 Jun 2006, 17:07, Reply)

The most cash I've ever carried (and it was HEAVY!)
I used to be the bookkeeper for a very popular grocery store here in the states. Every morning, we had an armored truck come to take all the money we had made the previous day. They came every day but Sunday.
After one particularly busy weekend, I did the books on Monday morning and I was shocked at the total amount we brought in. I stuck the cash in 2 large armor bags and called the store manager to sign it out. When he came in the office I was staring at the bags of money (possibly drooling, I can't recall). He took one look at the money and then one look at me and he said, "Don't even think about it." The total? $165,000.
(airplay71 ~eraserfreak~, Fri 23 Jun 2006, 17:03, Reply)

Can't remember how much.....
But it probably be like over AU$1,000.00 on rare occasions when I sometimes finished a full day of pizza delivery - but hey I was a top driver who got to do the big school orders to collect that much over the whole day.

(some of those school orders I just wish I had a cattle prod as standard equipment to keep the little vultures off me!)
(Mad_Nashy WHEEEEEE!, Fri 23 Jun 2006, 16:49, Reply)

About £125,000 in Polish currency
Back when I worked at a London Museum, somebody handed in a holdall that had been left lying around. On opening it up we found it was full of Polish Zlotys (unsure of spelling and too lazy to look it up. Mind I could have googled it in the time it took to write that. And that.)

I counted it out in the security office. Can't remember the exact number in Polish currency but when I did a quick check on an online currency converter, it worked out we had something like £125,000 in very used Polish notes.

So what did we do when someone came and reported losing their bag? Handed it back no questions asked.

It just seemed incredibly dodgy but the duty manager at the time thought nothing of it. Yeah right. An eigth of a million quid in used notes left in a scabby bag in a public museum and it didn't strike the security manager as dodgy? I must go back and nick stuff.
(Wascally Weasel now with 100% fewer jokes., Fri 23 Jun 2006, 16:47, Reply)

£200,000,000
My best friend's dad used to be a big cheese in The Midland bank when they got taken over by HSBC about 20-years ago.

The Midland had in excess of £800m of bearer bonds (like cash, only in much bigger denominations) that needed shifting from their vaults across the city to the HSBC. The various security companies quoted £1m+ for the job, so 4 directors of the Midland filled Tesco carrier bags and walked them the half-mile between the two vaults. Dave reckoned he had £200m in a Tesco bag and a cheese & pickle sandwich in the briefcase he was also carrying - the thinking being if he got mugged, they'd probably take the briefcase rather than his "shopping".

Needless to say, he told us this story the evening after it happened, rather than before...

My personal best : A paltry £4k in fifties - it's not as fat a roll as you'd think.
( Linbox has a serious dunk habit, Fri 23 Jun 2006, 16:46, Reply)

It's all relative.
Have just recently got back from travelling around india. Was quite impressive to withdraw 10,000 R from the ATM machines (works out at about £30) but felt like a lot more when we were bundling the cash into our wallets and pushing the beggars over*

Not used to having much money really, as I'm from up t'north and haven't even got a pot to piss in sometimes.... but it t'were all better in my day. Mostly fields and none of these new fangled internet thingie ma jiggs... eeeh.

*Not really. Although my girlfriend did hit a rikshaw driver with her umbrella.

- INSERT LENGTH/GIRTH JOKE HERE -
(No apologies by order of her majesty the Queen)
(mr-lizard Hell's teeth man!, Fri 23 Jun 2006, 16:43, Reply)

wifeb3ta post down there a bit .. reminded me I did something like that in the 80's
only we carried the cash to the sub post offices in a normal post van, as part of our run.. and before this rather stupid idea was stopped (after somebody leaked that we were doing it and a van got hijacked) we had maybe 3 or 4 standard posties bags filled with cash, stamps, postal orders in the back along with this weeks leaflet drops and normal post.... anyway, one week the van broke down and i was told by my boss that I had "special clearance" to use my own car, and that they would "hire" it from me for the day, and fill it with petrol..
happy days... except this is northern ireland, it is the middle of the hunger strike period and i have to drive into bandit country in an umarked car with £30 grand in the boot, we did not have any "ID cards" as such just our post office uniform, and a little armband with "post office" on it for the part timers.. (and from a distance, the "boyo's" had been known to mistake us for cops) That was a very interesting trip. Not least of all the look on the faces of the various chaps I met at the security checkpoints on the way in when I opened the bags to let them see what was in them..
but for that I got an extra £10 that week, my car filled with petrol and a "danger allowance" of 5p an hour.
( TBL I posted this on, Fri 23 Jun 2006, 16:43, Reply)

Dough in a duffle bag
I got a job selling posters during freshers fairs in my first year at poly and managed , with a mate, tp parlay that into a similar gig in the US.

We missed our flight and ended up 5 hours late in NW Washington DC(the bad part) trying to find our contacts house. 2.30 in the morning and we're sharing a floor with 16 lads from Bridlington, the gaffer's home town.

We were then dispatched to a u-haul where we rented a van in pairs and picked up rolls and rolls of smiths and new order posters from the airport.

Cut a long story short, my partner and I were selling about $2000 worth of bootlegged posters a day for 4 weeks travelling around the universities of Ohio and Indiana. (These things cost about 50c to print and ship and these hapless co-eds were paying 3 and 6 bucks a pop for them) I had a duffel bag full of cash by the end of it.

We arrived back in DC at the end of month and handed over the wedge, (minus wages and 'commission') to the lucky bleeder who'd hired us.

When they moved out of the house a year later ( to much safer and plusher digs) a holdall was found in the back of a cupboard with £56,000 in it in £100 bills.

Happy days.
(icebergslim, Fri 23 Jun 2006, 16:13, Reply)

Well...
Never even owned a dime...

I'm from sweden.
(Linusmartensson, Fri 23 Jun 2006, 16:12, Reply)