 A Placentia woman recently made a donation to Goodwill that was far more generous than she intended.When Linda Hoffman dropped off a bag of old clothes to Goodwill, she had no idea what was in a pocket of one of her husband's old shirts: his secret vacation stash of $8,000 in cash.Bob Hoffman had been secretly saving the cash for six years, planning to surprise his wife with a vacation to Italy when he retired.Two days later he realized the shirt - and his money - were missing.He then fessed up to his secret plan and the two of them rushed over to the Goodwill donation center. "I describe it as a miracle," Hoffman said. As she sifted through it, she found the shirt with Bob's stash.
– Always check your pockets. That's the message Bob Hoffman learned the hard way after his wife donated one of his old shirts—and $8,000 he had stuffed in a pocket. The man from Long Beach, Calif., was keeping the secret stash to surprise his wife, Linda, with a dream trip to Italy after he retired in 2018, the Orange County Register reports. For six years, Hoffman, 65, had been padding the wad, which he had kept in a bank account. He withdrew the cash earlier this month with the intention of helping out a relative who had fallen on hard times. In the meantime, he tucked in an envelope in the pocket of an orange shirt deep in his closet. Then he forgot about it until he had another $100 to contribute. Hoffman remembered that two days earlier his wife was making a Goodwill run and he helpfully offered to donate a bunch of old shirts. In the pile was the cash-stuffed orange shirt. Hoffman confessed his botched romantic plan to his wife, and the pair raced to the charity shop. But there no trace of the shirt. "Bob is an extremely strong human being," Linda Hoffman tells the Register. "I don’t want to hurt his male ego ... but he was crying." They went home and prayed. The next morning at 7:30 a phone call restored their faith in humanity. A Goodwill worker searching the warehouse found a bin of men's shirts—including an orange one. The couple recovered the cash and offered a fat reward. Goodwill refused. The Hoffmanns compromised and footed a pizza party for the staff. "What touched our hearts the most is how honest they were," Linda Hoffman tells ABC 7.