Heya! I had the exact same thing happen.. I've played this sim i have now, since Cats and dogs came out. I'm doing a sort of Rags to Rich challange. Happily enough I found one gold bar outside my house, made me super happy.. but then.. I went around to find some birds for my cat to chase, when suddenly.. I find a heap tone of gold bars, I mean literally just went around the whole neighborhood and found 68,000 simoleons worth of gold bars. I'm real happy but i find this an actual issue, it means raising money won't be time-consuming no more, It also doesn't give a sense of rarity fi they are just showing up constantly. I treat this as a bug that should be fixed! :/