An Australian man sold his beloved sportscar for $15,000 and stashed the cash in his kitchen oven.
He said he believed the cash would be safe in the oven because his wife never used it. It was a decision he regretted after his wife struggled to tell him the money had literally gone up in smoke.
She had turned on the oven to pre-heat some chicken nuggets for their children and inadvertently cooked the cash. “It was everything I had,” he told ninemsn.
“I’ve got nothing to my name. That money was supposed to go towards my mortgage. I had a call from Westpac on Tuesday asking me when I would pay because I missed a payment on Monday.”
“I told them ‘I’ll pay tomorrow’ but then the money was burnt’.” His distraught wife said she “couldn’t stop crying” when she told her husband what had happened.
“I struggled to breathe, I said ‘I burnt the money, I burnt the money’. I felt like I was going to faint,” she said. He said he was forced to sell his sports car to pay bills because the slow-down in the building industry had affected his business.
To make matters worse, the family’s water was cut off today after failing to pay their bill. After discovering his cash had been burnt he immediately set off to his bank in an attempt to deposit the money but the teller at Merrylands’ Westpac branch refused to accept the cash.
“I was quite insulted. I asked her to send it to the RBA, I told her ‘please it’s all I got’ but she didn’t want to,” he said.
After being contacted by the media, a spokesman for Westpac Merrylands offered an apology and said “we will do whatever we can do within the guidelines” to help him. The Reserve Bank of Australia has a clear policy on damaged and incomplete banknotes and advises people to take their damaged notes to banks.
