Recent financial
news reports that Americans are owed $33 billion or more in "unclaimed
money". Now, we can't promise you that someone took out a bank account
in your name and half that unclaimed money than yours. But, It's a lot
easier than it used to be to seek and find forgotten cash. Windfall or
not, it doesn't hurt to poke around on Internet databases.
In the past decade, the rise of the Internet
has made the process this simple: Enter your name and hit "go" on your
state's unclaimed-property website. A list will pop up showing possible
matches to be pursued, often with some hint of the amount of money
involved.
Although states keep
up the records, what we're talking about isn't tax-refund money. It's
things like bank accounts, stocks, uncashed dividend or payroll checks,
traveler's checks, insurance policies, customer overpayments, and
contents of safe-deposit boxes. The state databases are the result of
consumer-protection laws.
CBS's "Early Show"
reported Thursday morning that about $33 billion in unclaimed money
resides with state treasuries and other agencies, waiting to be
returned. This amounts to $280 per unclaimed payment, correspondent
Rebecca Jarvis said.
That may be the
average amount, but searches commonly turn up "less than $100."
"Unclaimed property
laws have been around since at least the 1940s, but have become much
broader and more enforced in the last 15 years," the National
Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators (NAUPA) says on its
website, which represents the state-level programs.
If you want to hunt
for some of this unclaimed money, here are some tips:
• Two key resources
for easy Web-based searching are unclaimed.org and MissingMoney.com.
Both charge no fee, are supported by NAUPA, and draw on state-based
lists of unclaimed money. The MissingMoney site, created by NAUPA in
1999, allows one-stop searching of more than half the states plus Puerto
Rico and the District of Columbia. Although not all states participate
in MissingMoney, the unclaimed.org site will link you to state-level
search tools.
• Remember to widen
your searches in appropriate ways. You can try variations of your name
(before a marriage, for example). You may have rights to some money that
was owed to deceased relatives, so you can search with their names as
well. Also, it may pay to look in all the states where you or the
relatives have lived.
• The NAUPA site
offers a page of links to other resources that may be helpful, including
Canadian and Swiss sites for unclaimed bank accounts and US federal
agencies such as Veterans Affairs and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp.