Many of us will have found cash in the street, picked the unexpected windfall up and been grateful for our good luck.
After all, the old schoolboy adage of 'finder's keepers' states that if you find something with no obvious owner, like a banknote , it's yours if you want it.
To mark Talk Money Week, we ask: are you really allowed to keep money if you find it lying around?
In short, not really - but it depends if the cash was abandoned or not.
Law firm Slater & Gordon says if you believe property - including cash - has been abandoned then you're allowed to keep it and not return it .
The only issue is that, realistically, no-one abandons money.
A Slater & Gordon spokesperson said: "If you hold the belief that the property has been abandoned then it is not theft to keep it.
"Clearly, if the object in question is money it would be reasonable to assume that it has been accidentally dropped or lost and therefore would not have been intentionally abandoned."
That means if you knowingly pick money up from the street you can be found guilty of an offence called ' theft by finding'.
For that charge to stick, you need to be found guilty of two things - being dishonest in the eyes of 'reasonable and honest' people, and knowing that you were being dishonest yourself.
And if you think this is all hot air and that the courts don't actually care, you'd be wrong.
In May this year a man called Sylvester Nowak was fined by magistrates after picking up a bum bag with £600 cash in it - which he kept.
Magistrates at North Staffordshire Justice Centre heard 51-year-old Nowak spotted the bag and took it for himself, spending the money on food, alcohol and a Christmas tree.
Nowak claimed there was only £310 in the bag, but the courts ordered him to repay the full amount to the bag's owner.
In 2017 Nicole Bailey wound up in court after picking up £20 she found on the floor of a One Stop Convenience shop.
She was eventually fined £175 and left with a criminal record, after falling foul of the ‘theft by keeping’ rules.
What to do if you find cash in public
To be safe, if you pick money up in public you should try to relocate it with its owner.
Examples include handing it in to a nearby shop, or a local police station .
Lancashire Constabulary and West Midlands Police both say if you find money in their areas you should hand it in.
But the good news is, if no-one claims it then you get to keep it with a clear conscience.
In Lancashire you have to wait 28 days, while in the West Midlands it's six weeks.
West Midlands Police said: "If you find money in a public place and did not see where it came from or who dropped it you should take it into your local police station.
"The front office worker will take your details and register the money. If after six weeks no one has claimed the money then you are legally entitled to claim it for yourself. You should revisit the police station to find out if it has been claimed."
