#Ohio family accidentally trashes $25K while cleaning house

Well, they saved a boatload of money — just not in the traditional way.

An Ohio family brought new meaning to the term “getting cleaned out” after accidentally tossing away $25,000 while tidying up their grandmother’s messy home.

The freak incident came to light Wednesday after Republic Services, a waste collection agency in Lorain County, received a frantic call from an unnamed customer claiming they’d lost something important in the trash, ABC reported.

Operations supervisor Gary Capan relayed the facepalm-inspiring story: “They were cleaning out their house for their grandmother and they cleaned out the refrigerator, threw out all the garbage, grabbed all the freezer stuff and put it in a bag,” the garbage boss said. “And then the grandma was like, ‘Hey, there’s an envelope with $25,000 in there, don’t lose that.’”

After getting off the phone, Capan and his team immediately got to work trying to recuperate the discarded funds. However, they were racing against the clock as once the trash trucks offloaded the garbage at the landfill, the bulldozers would immediately start flattening the waste and covering it with dirt in a “nonstop process,” obliterating any hope of recovering the money.

“If [the cash] got dropped [at the landfill], there’s no finding it anymore,” explained Capan. However, his crew managed to intercept the garbage truck just in time, whereupon they diverted it to a local recycling center so they could try and salvage granny’s savings.

“I told the girls, if it’s in there, we’ll find it for you, because they were pretty upset,” said Dan Schoewe, the recycling center’s operations manager.

Salvation came after six workers jumped upon the six-ton mountain of trash, and managed to fish the money out of the pile.

“It took 10 minutes and actually, I said, ‘Man, it looks just like that,’ pulled it off, opened it up and there was the package inside with the money,” said Schoewe. “They were so happy, they were tearing up.”

This isn’t the first time someone’s financially thrown out the baby with the bathwater. This past may, a California woman redefined “laundering money” after accidentally tossing a $26 million dollar lotto ticket in the wash.