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20 former burglars and people who have been robbed share tips on where to hide your valuables.

Surviving a home invasion is one of the worst feelings out there. Not only does your home now feel exposed and unsafe, but you&#39;re also saddled with replacing the valuables you can while figuring out how to feel safe again.Obviously, no victim of burglary is responsible for someone else&#39;s crime. If a thief targets you, that is on them, not you. However, there are tips and tricks that can make it easier to protect yourself from home invasion - and who among us doesn&#39;t want to feel a bit safer?In a recent Reddit thread, a few former burglars and people who have been robbed shared the best ways to protect your cash. 1. C0SAS suggests a cheap investment in LED lighting. LED lighting is cheap these days. If your house is gonna be vacant for a while, consider investing in one of those smart-lighting home automation systems where you can set different rooms to turn on and off at different points in the day. (Kitchen during dinnertime, bedrooms at night, etc.)  My neighbor did that and it fooled me. I rang his doorbell to ask to borrow a pressure washer wand, with no response. Figured he was with family and wasn&#39;t taking any more visitors, but turns out he&#39;s been on vacation for the past four days. 2. aj9811 has an A+ prank. This doesn&#39;t exactly answer the question asked, but it is a tip on potentially protecting your valuables. Bear with me because it&#39;s a bit strange: Glue a spare key (not one that opens something important) under your door mat. Weird right?  A few years ago I did this in addition to installing cameras. Over the last couple of years I&#39;ve seen this exact scenario play out: thief walks to the door, checks under the mat, unsuccessfully tries to grab the key, backs up, looks around to see if anyone is watching (presumably because they think they have fallen for some trap/prank where they are being surveilled), and LEAVES. They don&#39;t even search for another way in because it spooks them. 3. ImAlwaysRightHanded recommends burying a safe in laundry. Had my house burglarized by a so called friend. He missed by far the most valuable thing. it&rsquo;s just a safe sitting on the laundry room floor. He missed it because I&rsquo;m a scumbag and had it covered with a mountain of dirty clothes and towels. So not being tidy saved me upwards of 35k. 4. zepaperclip knows you should never leave your textbooks in your car. For the college kids that might read this, don&#39;t keep your textbooks in your car. On the day of my finals I had about 6 textbooks I was gonna sell after my finals, I left the books in my car while I took my tests. Came back to find someone broke my window out to steal the textbooks. Cop told me that it&#39;s very common and unlikely they will catch the guy, so I was out ~$700, which was huge as a college student. 5. ban_me_daddyy has seen how false outlets can protect your goods. I&#39;ve seen people make false outlets for hiding valuables like cash and jewelry. Just an idea, a burglar would have to be at your home for a long time to start checking outlets. 6. D_I_M_E has the ultimate prank idea. I&#39;m going to keep a small safe in the living room with a giant foam middle finger inside for when the day comes. 7. chacham2 knows you should never keep valuables in the night stand. We had our apartments burgled, there were four apartments in the area. Guy kicked down the door, and apparently was in a out pretty quickly.  I came home from work, cop told me, never leave valuables in your nightstand. Might have even said bottom drawer. Sure enough mine were checked, i could tell because my envelopes were moved from where i placed them. 8. marty_arty knows you have to be creative with where you store spare keys. Don&rsquo;t keep spare key near front door. Under pot plant, under door mat, top of door frame etc 9. S0nd said it&#39;s the obvious steps people most often forget. Obligatory never done it but you&rsquo;d be surprised at how often people leave their cars unlocked with nice things inside. A lot of people actually leave them unlocked with the keys inside lol, it&rsquo;s how the majority of cars are stolen. Eliminating the easy opportunity is the easiest step and will do a lot to keep your valuables safe. 10. downwarddawg&#39;s cousin has a great fake-out plan. My cousin lives in a bad neighborhood, so she went to a thrift store, bought an obvious looking jewelry box and a bunch of expensive looking costume jewelry that&rsquo;s actually worthless and put it in the box. She keeps this in a conspicuous place. Then she leaves a few 20&rsquo;s on top. This way if someone breaks in, they will grab this and run, ignoring some of her well hidden valuables. 11. AlphaTangoFoxtrt says people are surprisingly awful at locking their sheds. Your shed. Seriously. LOCK YOUR F*CKING SHED. Even if your house is well locked, if your shed isn&#39;t I likely have access to a plethora of tools I can use to gain access. Don&#39;t help the burglar. Lock your shed. 12. RallyX26 knows that not all safes are safe. Any safe that&#39;s not bolted down and is small enough for 1-2 people to carry isn&#39;t safe at all. Also, my ex&#39;s grandfather had a safe stolen from his home that was bolted down - the thieves wrapped a chain around it and ran it out the window to a truck. Took the safe straight through the wall.  All they had to do was follow the drag marks though... But still. 13. According to Auferstehen78, you should break down the boxes for anything valuable so they&#39;re not visible outside. Don&#39;t leave things out that people can see from outside your home or car. If you buy a new TV or computer break down the box it came in. Don&#39;t just leave it by your garbage bin. Lock doors and windows.  Keep your handbag close and closed. If someone wants to break in they will. Don&#39;t keep everything out in the open. And have insurance on anything that is valuable. 14. brucekeller knows that most safes are easy to break into, so you should go the extra mile if you want them secure. A safe. Also, almost all locks are bullshit unless you had a locksmith put in security pins, but the robbers can just take the safe and figure it out later if time is an issue.  edit: On the lock issue, if you are in the US, there are about 5 major door lock manufacturers, a thief can have just 5 bump keys, plus a few others just in case, and get in your house easily. A bump key is just a referenced key that is ground down to 4 or 5 equal triangular points. When inserted with the proper bump key to the lock, you just bump the back of the key with a rubber mallet and try to time the turn when all of the pins align. Usually just takes about 5 tries or less. 15. dalaigh93 recommends vents and inconvenient spaces. I heard a lot of people hide stuff in the air vents, is it searched usually?  Also, my mum used to hide what little valuables we had in a small space behind our washing machine, a really heavy one. Except if you knew it was there you couldn&#39;t know there was a space here, and that it was accessible.  She had to spend 10-15 minutes hiding stuff because it was really hard to access, so I guess that burglars wanting to do their thing as quickly as possible wouldn&#39;t spend time looking there. 16. DreamGirl3 met a woman who &quot;planted&quot; her money in some flowers (which is obviously a bad idea). Obligatory &quot;not a burglar&quot; but I did work at bank. Another teller told me about how this woman brought in a flower pot to the girl&#39;s teller station. The bank teller was understandably confused when the woman pointed at the flower pot and says, &quot;I need to make a deposit.&quot; Turns out, this woman had planted thousands of dollars in her flower pot over the years. The problem? She watered that flower for years with the money planted in the soil.  Not only that, but she wrapped every bill in duct tape to keep the water from messing up the bills. The teller had to dig into the pot, and help this woman unwrap money from duct tape. The teller said the worst part was the bills were soggy and moldy when they unwrapped them, so most of them were torn, or the ink was faded beyond readability so the woman lost money. Don&#39;t put your money in flower pots or wrap it in duct tape.  EDIT to clarify to anyone who has questions:   I have no idea why this lady did this except that she must have thought it kept her cash safe.   I was told this story by my coworker when I first started as a bank teller. She was always a truthful person so I have reason to believe her, however, I recognize this is hearsay in terms of storytelling. I&#39;m just repeating what I was told.   The government does take damaged bills back and refunds you your money if you meet their guidelines (links to said Bureau and guidelines are in many comments below). Please utilize this if you are worried about your bill&#39;s integrity.   Also, I worked at a credit union so we were required to do ridiculous and odd things like this for customers. This is just one in many strange stories I heard and/or experienced. To understand our (the tellers&#39;) line of thinking, please note that any signs of a customer being unhappy was dealt with by being verbally reprimanded in front of the customer, even if we were following policy.   17. doesitmatter83 remembers all the areas the burglar trashed. Not a burglar, but our home has been broken into. We only had the one-bedroom at the time, but the places that the burglar looked into were: the closet (everything was thrown out), desk drawers (found a bit of cash and our passports were taken), the entry furniture (drawers), under the bed / bedside tables. At least now I know where not to hide valuables. Not that I have any.  Edit: Thanks for the gold, kind stranger! I better hide it in the freezer now. Edit2: typo, burglar not burgler 18. 11357K suggests never leaving your purse unattended while loading groceries. Not a burglar but grew up in a high crime area &amp; knew some boys out there &ldquo; hitting licks.&rdquo; Bit off topic, but there were some guys that would ride a bike through busy parking lots searching for women loading up after shopping &amp; leaving their purse unattended in their shopping cart. Ride by &amp; snatch. Then have a getaway route that a full sized vehicle can&rsquo;t follow them through. 19. Joeycane27 had a fake out safe. We had a huge safe that takes 2-3 people to move. They broke into my house and flipped everything all over searching, but when they found the safe they left everything else and focused on taking that. I even had IPads and Rolex watches lying around in open. Point is, we kept the safe empty, would only keep a few fake pieces of jewelry in case there was ever a home invasion we could offer them something to take. 20. Kaleopolitus&#39;s mom has a very savvy hiding space. My mother has a closet filled with food supplies, boxes of bags of spices and such. There&#39;s at least 3 dozen such boxes at all times in said closet. ONE OF THEM, and she replaces it regularly so the expiration date remains relevant, she opens up carefully, fills with valuables, and then carefully closes back up.  She had me try to find which one of the boxes it was. I genuinely couldn&#39;t tell from sight alone, only the slightly different heft tipped me off after 10 minutes. No burglar will ever find that stash. 21. shocksalot123 has a fire hack. Pro tip: Hide your small valuables inside a used/empty fire extinguisher, no one is going to steal a fire extinguisher... 22. glisters is a cop who has a series of tips. I&#39;m not a burglar, but no one else in this thread is either. I am, however, a police officer. Hiding your valuables is fine, but ideally you don&#39;t want to get even to the point where someone is in your house. Most people worried about where to hide their valuables would be better off spending time considering their house&#39;s security from the outside. My advice:    Front perimeter. Unless you have a gated mansion then your front door is going to be accessible from the street. That means there is no benefit security-wise in high fences, prickly hedges, etc. All these do is screen your house from view, making it far easier for someone to break into without being seen. If you&#39;re looking at two houses and only one can be seen from the road then you&#39;re 100% going to be breaking into the other. That&#39;s why picket fences, low hedges/walls, etc. are ideal. A gravel driveway is a nice touch too - nice and noisy so anyone approaching your house makes their presence known.   Rear perimeter. Completely the opposite advice is true here. At least here in the UK, the rear of most houses is shielded from view, so anyone getting into your back garden will have undisturbed access to your house. So you want to shield your house from view and make access difficult. Tall hedges, solid fences, prickly bushes, etc. are your friends.   Flat rooves. Here in the UK it&#39;s common to have a single story garage with a flat roof attached to your house. Often the house will have a window that opens over it. That window needs to be closed.   Exterior lighting, cameras and alarms. Both make a house much less attractive to a burglar. Lights (both motion-sensing and just a simple porch light) make someone scoping out the house or trying to force entry much more visible. Cameras and alarms are pretty obvious deterrents. Again, it&#39;s about making your house a less tempting target than others as opposed to creating an impenetrable fortress.   Sheds. Sheds are a soft touch for burglary. Garden tools, bikes, DIY tools, etc. are expensive and very easy to sell second hand. Go on Ebay and look at the price of a decent second hand petrol mower or leaf blower - that&#39;s easy money and low risk when you consider that it takes about 2 seconds to cut off a padlock and no-one will be sleeping in the shed. Don&#39;t leave expensive kit in sheds, cover the windows so that the contents can&#39;t be readily seen, and install motion-sensing lighting to cover them. If you&#39;re keen as mustard, there are even cheap wireless alarms that link to basically a doorbell in the house. But the best advice is just be sensible what you&#39;re storing there.   Breaking and entering tools. Don&#39;t leave your ladders and other tools that can be used to break into your house readily accessible outside it. I&#39;ve seen houses with open upstairs windows and a set of ladders stored visibly down one side of the house. If you&#39;re leaving out tools that a burglar can use to break into your house then you&#39;re doing it wrong.   Tradesmen. When you park your van outside your house you are saying &quot;I&#39;ve got expensive tools here&quot;. Don&#39;t leave them in your van.   Letterboxes. This probably isn&#39;t an issue for the states, but here in the UK we have letterboxes through our front doors. Most people also keep their house and car keys by the front door. If you can look through your letterbox and see your keys then you need to move them - they can easily be hooked through the letterbox using e.g. the top segment of a fishing rod. Then someone will be driving around in your car with a set of keys to your house.    Spare keys. Don&#39;t hide a key outside your house. Certainly don&#39;t hide it in a fake rock etc. If you absolutely must, then at least bury it in a flower bed or something. You&#39;re better off leaving a key with a friend (or burying it in their flower bed, if you must) - but don&#39;t give it to them with a keyring identifying your house! Also, don&#39;t leave a spare key in your car - someone breaking into your car won&#39;t need to look up your address - there&#39;ll always be some paperwork or other in there that identifies it.     Perhaps most importantly, get to know your neighbours and share your plans with them. If you&#39;re going away for a week then tell them. Neighbours who generally know each others&#39; habits will notice when there is a strange van parked in your drive, or lights are mysteriously turning on whilst you&#39;re out of town. And they&#39;ll be more likely to act rather than minding their own business.     Be conscious of what you can see through your windows. For example, as you approach my front door you walk past the window to a room full of various computing kit that look expensive. When I&#39;m not using the room, I normally close the blind simply to conceal what&#39;s inside - otherwise I&#39;m suggesting to anyone calling at the house for any reason that there is expensive gear lying around the place.     Finally, break into your house. Or at least, figure out how you would. That will show you the weaknesses. When I was a student I was really bad at locking myself out of the house and would regularly need to break in. I&#39;ve climbed the back fence to access a backdoor I suspected was left unlocked, used a piece of card to flick open the locks on sash windows, managed to wriggle down an old coal chute into the cellar, etc. Each time I&#39;d fix the problem but next time I was faced with the need to get inside I&#39;d find another way in. It&#39;s a very helpful exercise to test your security.                   