I live in Mexico.
Every smart urban boy I have ever known, including yours truly, knew the three money hideaways trick, whether on your person while walking to the store in a dicey neighborhood or storage at home: 1) money in your wallet (never very much but enough to be convincing to a robber if you know how to do “the poor boy” thing and aren’t so stupid as to be wearing a Rolex or the like), 2) money somewhere like between an inner and outer sock in your shoe or up your calf – you surrender this if the robber was smart enough and self possessed enough to demand “the rest of the money” while waving a gun at you, 3) your real main cache which you hide in your “pants”.
Similarly at home. I have a formidable safe at home where I have put a couple bottles of fancy looking but cheap wine, a bottle of obviously extremely expensive Mezcal that is actually water mixed with a shot of sewage to give the right color and with the bottle carefully resealed and refoiled, a few display boxes of utterly exquisite looking junk costume jewelry bought at yard sales, and a rubber banded wad of play money rolled inside a thin layer of real Benjamins. In a secret compartment behind the drawers of an antique desk a $200 or so wad of real money, and in a sock in a rusted can currently under greasy and dogdoo’d clean up rags is my real cache of emergency funds and my only jewelry (a turqoise belt buckle and bolo tie), and a fine big bag of old silver dimes and quarters. I move that cache around every couple of months.
david fb