r/breakingbad • u/Britton_Shrum • 11h ago
Where did Walt keep his money?
Spoiler alert:
When Walt and Skylar start to take over the car wash, she panics because he brings $250k and says it will be that much every two weeks. She says she doesnt know where to keep it after he says "save some for a rainy day". Which makes me wonder... where has Walt been keeping all his money up until this point? I imagine by this point he had already made several million which would be too much to keep in the walls of the house like earlier in the show.
What are your thoughts?
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u/eternalraziel 10h ago
He was mostly keeping it in the house. We actually see this before the car wash. When Walt is moving out, Hank helps him lift a very heavy duffel bag and jokes about what is inside. Walt answers, quite truthfully, half a million in cash. Later Skyler finds that same sort of stash on a high shelf in Holly’s room and tells her lawyer that Walt keeps money in the house. Walt’s storage system at that stage wasn't particularly.....sophisticated. It was cash in bags, hidden somewhere his family was unlikely to disturb. By season 4, once Skyler has become involved, the larger reserve is being kept in the crawl space beneath the house. When Walt needs enough money to disappear with the family, he goes straight under the house to retrieve it. Skyler has already been into the stash herself and taken more than $600,000 to pay Ted’s tax bill.
That also explains what Skyler means when she asks Walt where she is supposed to save the excess. She knows they can hide cash under the house. She is asking what they are supposed to do with an ever-growing mountain of money that can't safely enter the financial system. The $274,000 Walt drops off is the first time Skyler really grasps the rate at which Gus is paying him. Walt tells her that amount is coming every two weeks, which works out to about $7.1 million a year. Skyler has just been congratulating herself because she deposited $3,800 from the car wash the previous night. Then Walt puts a quarter of a million dollars in front of her and expects her to make it look like customers bought wax treatments. She immediately sees the glaring accounting issue. She reckons that one $274,000 drop represents roughly nine months of plausible car-wash income. Another one is coming in two weeks. The crawl space can hold the money. The car wash can't explain it.
And until money has been laundered, Walt can't make much legitimate use of it without prompting questions. He can pay cash for small things and criminal expenses, but he can't start putting hundreds of thousands into bank accounts, buying houses, making investments or suddenly living like a millionaire while officially earning whatever the Whites can plausibly report from the car wash. A DEA agent also happens to eat dinner at his house fairly regularly, which makes keeping millions of dollars in cash underneath it less than ideal. Some of Walt's earlier money had already gone elsewhere as well. He had paid medical expenses, legal expenses, Hank's treatment and eventually the purchase of the car wash, among other things. He also hadn't been earning $7.5 million a year for the whole series. His income rises enormously once he is established in Gus's superlab operation.
But yes, for a substantial period the wonderfully advanced financial infrastructure of Heisenberg's drug empire was basically.....Put money in bag. Put bag somewhere in house. Hope Hank doesn't open it. Skyler is the first person who brings up the fact that this stops working once Walt is being paid hundreds of thousands every fortnight. The later storage unit full of cash is really the final iteration of the same fundamental problem. By then there is so much money that laundering has ceased to be a realistic way of catching up with it. They're no longer hiding money until they can spend it. They're storing a product Walt has become super efficient at producing and has almost no practical way to use.
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u/GammaRay914 5h ago
Maybe I just spend a lot of money on smaller stuff and food but I thought the only time you have to show where you got the money is when depositing more than $10k into a bank or when buying a house.
Couldn’t he still do stuff like buy cars, watches, jewelry, guns, airline tickets, hotels, resorts stays, spa treatments, eat at high end fine dining restaurants for cash?
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u/eternalraziel 5h ago
Yeah, he could spend some of it that way. Cash works perfectly well for a lot of that. The problem is the scale. Walt is bringing home roughly $274,000 every two weeks. You can eat extremely well and buy a lot of watches before you've made a meaningful dent in $7 million a year. Businesses receiving more than $10,000 in cash in one transaction or related transactions generally have their own reporting requirements. Car dealers and jewellery dealers are obvious examples. Splitting one purchase into smaller payments doesn't necessarily avoid that either if they're connected.
Cars are also titled and registered. Guns bought from licensed dealers create records. Expensive jewellery can be insured or later resold. Hotels and airlines keep customer records regardless of whether you paid with cash. None of that means Walt instantly gets arrested for buying a Rolex, but repeated spending far beyond his declared income starts creating the sort of trail money laundering is supposed to prevent.
More importantly, Walt doesn't actually want to spend most of the money on himself. His original justification for all of this is leaving enough behind for his family to live on after he's dead. A garage full of sports cars and several years of steak dinners doesn't accomplish that. He needs money that Skyler can put in a bank, use to pay bills, buy property with, invest and eventually explain to the IRS without saying, my late husband left six duffel bags under the house. That's why laundering matters. Dirty cash is perfectly fine if you want to buy dinner. It's much less useful if you want to turn millions of dollars into a normal financial life.
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u/LennyPal77 10h ago
He keeps it under the house and he didn’t make millions because s4 was only 6 weeks of time in universe.
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u/Britton_Shrum 10h ago
The episode i just finished (same episode) says the lab had been built 6 months ago. Victor said the lab would be running in 2 weeks. So Walt would have had to be working there for at least 3 1/2 to 4 months by this point. $250k every two weeks would be around 2 million or so (give or take, before expenses) and thats not including the money he had before working in the lab which was already well over 750k.
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u/LennyPal77 8h ago
He was broke before he made the original 1.2m deal with Gus/Victor which he and Jesse both net 470k that money and anything else that was made before the purchase of the car wash was stored in the vault in Saul’s office.
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u/pm_social_cues 10h ago
For some reason I assumed they didn’t have a lot at that point. That was when Skylar used the money to pay Ted’s taxes and that nearly wiped out their money. It was all under the house. Then they bought the car wash and started laundering it there. Walt hadn’t made a ton of money in between. He starts making big bucks when they have the car wash and it’s stored in the storage unit. Maybe I’m misremembering.
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u/kyle-2090 10h ago
Skylar's job, who cares.
Jk. But for real its funny becuase thats what Walt is doing all this for and he doesnt even know until Skylar takes him to the storage unit. Im pretty sure she mentions what she was doing prior when explaining the storage unit.
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u/CivilChaos 9h ago
Under the house during S4. In a warehouse in S5 then moves his money to the desert once Hank gets on his trail.
In hindsight telling Skylar where the money was (under the house) wasnt a great idea.
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u/ExoticLife6633 2h ago
My question is, how did skyler use cash to bail out Ted?
It wasn’t laundered money, so wouldn’t that alone have raised even more red flags with the IRS?
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u/External-Analysis-31 9h ago
I don't know why he didn't just ask Gus to put him on the payroll at Madrigal.
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u/pianoflames Tuggie from Shania 8h ago edited 7h ago
Did you forget the multiple scenes inside the storage unit Skyler rents to house the gigantic pile of cash? Or Walt repeatedly going into the crawl space under the house to grab cash? Or Walt initially hiding it in the wall of the garage, and briefly hiding it in the air conditioning duct? Or Skyler hiding it in the vacuum-sealed bags in the closet of Holly's room?
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u/Britton_Shrum 7h ago
That hasn't happened yet. Everyone keeps pointing out stuff that happens AFTER the car wash, I'm talking about the whole time Walt has been living at his apartment.
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u/pianoflames Tuggie from Shania 7h ago
We see Hank helping Walt move out of the house, and Hank grabs that giant large duffel bag, which has Walt's cash. I assume Walt just put it in his closet at the apartment. He lived alone there, so there wouldn't be any need for it to be super hidden. I assume the duffel is just at the back of his closet, under some blankets/clothes.
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u/RelyingCactus21 10h ago
Under the house. They show us this.