Opened previous owners mail

[justalittlelemondrizzle]

Since buying the house almost a year ago we have recieved all the old owners mail. Everything from car insurance and bank statements to birthday cards and junk mail. I've been returning everything to sender and for the last couple of months letters have greatly reduced and have almost stopped. It was my birthday the other day and today a birthday card came in the post. I didn't look at the name on the envelope as it was clearly a birthday card so just opened it like a giddy child wondering who it could be from. Well it wasn't for me but the previous owners son and £50 fell out. I'm not sure what to do. I have no forwarding address and I can't return this to sender.

We get Christmas cards every year for people who have never lived in our house. We've lived in the house for over 10 years. I think these people must live in a similarly named street (round us we have e.g. primrose street/primrose road/primrose avenue/primrose crescent - note not the real names) but I have no way of finding them unless I go round all four streets and knock on our house number. No money in the Christmas cards sadly.

Who sends that much cash in the mail?!?!

BTW, we have lived in our house for 6 years and the lady who used to own it lives next door (although for a while she rented it out and lived somewhere else, we didn't know where). When she's been next door we've dropped around loads of mail for her, ber ex-husband and her three adult children (who all live elsewhere and have done so since before we bought the place). None of them have ever said thank you or arranged a re-direction. When the place next door was rented and I didn't have a forwarding address, I returned heaps of mail to sender, especially banks, insurance places etc. But I still get mail from from those places. It's crazy. Every year I get a Christmas card with no return address on it. Every year I drop it next door (with the address crossed out and 'name of neighbour this must be for you' written on it, and every year the neighbour fails to inform her friend that she's moved next door. I should start charging for my service!

The first name would be inside the card.

But I do love the idea of local police working on The Case of the Missing Birthday Card Money.

Very Stars Hollow.

The previous owners of our house asked us to forward on their post forever as they didn't want to tell their DM their new address.

A 'sorry, that doesn't work for us' sorted that out.

Definitely keep it!!!

so annoying that someone wouldn't update their address and expect you to sort through and forward (or return) their mail. The same service would have been provided by Royal Mail for a price and as I've used it before I'm aware it's not exactly cheap so in my eyes you should take the money if you think you could use it and it can be in exchange for all the mail sorting and returning you've done.
And if they realise they are missing it then maybe they'll pay for a redirection instead of leaving it all to you.

Mad they didn't get mail redirected and/or didn't tell people they'd moved. We did ours for 3 months and the new owners asked us to extend it, so we did for the shortest period. And we told everyone we had moved. Very odd. I'd feel bad about keeping the money, people are daft sending cash through the post though, so I'd prob keep in a drawer for a bit and see if anyone claims it (if not, spend it).

Our vendors had mail redirected for 6 months but when that ran out we got loads of post for them, and they'd moved again with no forwarding address, so solicitors and estate agents were no help. Had to RTS everything after that.

The tenants they'd rented to clearly left debts and carried on using our address for years, as 12 years later we still get demands for them. We usually call up the debt collectors and point out that they're the fifth people to chase the same debt and suggest they give up.

Noncommittal OP said there was no first name inside the card. Sounds odd, but it was an 18th card and addressed to "Mr Surname". Guess sender of card was trying to mske the point that the recipient us now an adult.

Nothing sensible to add except that previous tenants of our house did something similar - moved without bothering to use a redirect service, leaving behind debts that bailiffs called round for, and a torrent of incoming mail. They probably got at least three or four items every day whereas we only seem to get about one thing a fortnight. They then had the nerve half a year later to send us a shitty message through the neighbour telling us that they wanted all their mail from the past six months posting to their new forwarding address and that it was illegal for us to keep it. Fuckwits. I sent back one bundle without postage so that they could pay for the privilege of retrieving it from the post office, and put a pretty curt note inside saying that from then on, everything else would get binned, no matter how important. After that the tide of post calmed right down.