The people who lived here before us were a bit of a bad lot. They left without paying 6 months rent, the house was trashed, i’m still fending off debt collectors and baliffs for around £25,000 worth of credit card and various other debt and, not surprisingly, they left no forwarding address. Equally, they had rather a lot of people who just came to stay for a while, for whom post occasionally arrives but i still have no addresses for.
I’ve got into the habit of opening post now with no address to return it to – on several occasions this has avoided us having to have our chattels removed at 8am by baliffs, it has got rid of the worst of the debt letters and i’ve been able to return some personal post to the sender when there has been an address inside it. Which, while not legal, seems slightly more human than not bothering.
So today a letter for one of the “friends” came. It had old lady writing and was thickish and it turns out to be a card from a loving auntie. It has photos, absolutely no return address, surname or anything else and £30 in it. 🙁
So here is my dilemma. I know what happens to unreturnable post, it goes to Belfast thewn after 6 weeks it gets incinerated. So i could do that, but it seems a feeble option, given i know it has money in it.
I could hang on to it forever and ever and hope this loving aunty, who the girl hasn’t bothered to let know where she is, eventually writes here with an address in it. But the chances are are i’ll lose it or forget or something. And i am fairly sure this aunt wrote last year too and no one came looking for the letter.
I could donate the money to charity and decide that in the circumstances, that is the most useful help i can be.
I’m not going to spend it, obviously, that would just be wrong. But which is the most right?
Donate the £30 to charity and tuck the card away somewhere safe so that if next year’s one contains an address you can forward it on? Or spend the £30 and if another one turns up with the address send it on with £30?
give the money to charity and if the people ever come back pay them the £30 yourself
erm…is this a test??!!! I’m not very good at recognising them.
Well, charity seems the most ‘right’ thing to do. Or you could give the post to your landlord and have nothing more to do with it?
Charity.
We still have post for the chap who used to live here. I never open it as I am scared of what I might find apart from the moral side, as he had an alternative lifestyleI just bin it. Might have thrown a fortune away!
No. It’s real. And the landlord, nice as he is, lost a lot of money because of the main family and might keep it. Which doesn’t seem the right thing to do either.
I know for a fact he has no idea where they are, so that is not going to work.
Have actually vaguely wondered about the police. Its an unusual surname and i suppose they might have ways of tracing it.
Yeah, hand it in then if he doesn’t claim it they’ll give it back THEN you can give it to charity.
well, you can try and chase surname on internet. i would then go with the charity.
Well, in terms of a ‘moral’ dilemma I would suggest that doing anything with it would be ‘immoral’, other than returning to the post office. Giving money to charity is in effect spending it – how could you be sure that you were giving it to a charity of which the owner (who I would suggest is the sender) of the money would approve.
In terms of ‘a’ dilemma, I’d spend it on stuff I’d have bought anyway, safe in the knowledge that if I was ever required to do the morally correct thing it wouldn’t cost me anything (overall) to return the money to the owner.
Good point Chris.
Burn it and save yourself a conscience then
islamically, you advertise whatever you have found for a set period of time (ie:contact the police to register it and try and trace the sender/ intended recipient)
then, if that throws nothing up, it would be yours to spend.
if the owner then turns up later you would be obliged to compensate to an equivalent amount…
or, you can keep it in a ‘safe’ place until they return, but 30.00 isn’t too bad to compensate, so i’d spend spend spend (after advertising)
i don’t think the british law on not opening post addressed to someone else is very applicable when you are trying to forward mail / prevent bailifs. i would want someone to open and return to sender if possible if i had moved. i think most people would?
kdja
It’s not illegal to open post addressed to someone else delivered to your house unless you open it with the intention of doing them some harm by reading the contents.
I’m not even sure that there is any law that says specificaly that you can’t open someone elses letter that you happen to find.
anyway, i’m with The other Chris on this one on what i’d do with the money. I’d try and keep the card/photos etc. safe ‘just in case’
I wouldn’t bother with the police, I can’t see them being at all intersted in knowing about it or tracing the sender. They would probably just tell you to send it back to the PO
Try to find the auntie… I don’t know if it is the best thing to do morally but playing detective is fun and surely it can prove to be educational too 😉
I’m not sure what to do with the £30, but I would continue to open the mail. We have lived her for 4 1/2 years and are still getting mail from agencies owed money by the previous owners, although it has become less so I think most of them have given up by now and realised that they have moved. The worst ones are the agencies who ring and try to ‘trick’ me into revealing that I’m really the previous owners – they don’t half get an earful from me!
I once had a similar dilemma – our old house in Redhill had been rented by some people with debts before we bought it, and debt collectors used to turn up at the door looking for them, but we had no forwarding address. Again it was quite an unusual name, and I was working as a GP locum in all but one of the practices around Redhill, and I came across the name, on a medical letter or something, with the new address. iirc it was actually after the debt collectors had given up, but I did start forwarding the mail after that, and he must have wondered how I found his address.