Why Picking Up An Old Rusty Can On Your Property Can Be A $10 Million Good Idea

A middle aged couple somewhere in California were walking along a path on their rural property not long ago.

A lucky California couple found $10
million in gold coins buried on their property.  

They'd lived there for years and walked along the path countless times.  But on this day, the wife glanced down to the edge of the path and noticed the ground had eroded a bit in one spot, exposing part of an old, rusty can.

She examined it further and found a whole bunch of gold coins in and around the mostly buried can.

In all, there were 1,427 coins there, all dating from between 1847 and 1894. They're worth $10 million, and at this point, it's finders keepers, according to CBS News.

The gold in the coins isn't super valuable. But since the coins are in mint condition and some of them are exceedingly rare, numismatist Don Kagin came up with the $10 million figure when he assessed them.

Not surprisingly, everybody is keeping their mouth shut about precisely where the coins were found and who the lucky couple is.

The couple don't want their property overrun by prospectors digging around for more coins, and the couple want to keep their low-key, quiet lifestyle without everybody bugging them for handouts or suddenly becoming their long lost cousin who could stand a few bucks.

According to Kagin, the couple will sell most of the coins and use a lot of the money to give away to charity, which is super cool. They'll keep a few as momentos.

And I bet they'll keep an eagle eye out on their rocks for more rusty cans.

They're so much luckier than me. The strange person who lived in the St. Albans, Vermont house before I bought the place left a whole lot of "buried treasure" around the property.

As I've been digging the past five years creating gardens on my land, I've found dozens of buried tires, for some reason. Also, a few pairs of old boots, some childrens' toys, pieces of pipe, a window frame, too many beer cans to count, and an empty wallet with no ID in it.

But this California find galvanizes me to not get too upset when I inevitably find more buried stuff in my yard as I make new gardens this spring. You never know. I might find something valuable, eventually.

As long as I don't dig up any dead bodies, it's all good.