Given that the Department of Finance’s Division of Revenue took in over $364.9 in Delaware unclaimed money in 2006 alone, it’s safe to assume that the state is holding many more hundreds of millions, if not over a billion dollars in lost money, that belongs to regular people who simply need to step forward and claim it. There are tens of billions in abandoned assets across the nation, but DE holds a disproportionately large chunk of it because it is home to so many corporations’ headquarters.

On top of the issues of not knowing how often and where to search, the majority of Americans don’t realize that they could be owed DE unclaimed property even if they’ve never lived in or been to the The Small Wonder. Over the years DE has turned in to the go to state for putting down a company’s headquarters. When companies have locations and branches in multiple states, unclaimed paychecks won’t be handed over to the treasury departments of those states, they will be turned over to DE. For this reason, a person wanting to track down abandoned assets wouldn’t find a record of their property in the state they live in, and would probably never check DE’s records.

In addition to non-DE residents potentially finding unclaimed property in DE, DE residents could be owed cash from other states. To start with, there are obviously many companies that are incorporated in other states that have employees in DE, but there are still other reasons, like insurance overpayments, that might leave a DE resident’s lost cash stuck in another state.

Once people become aware of unclaimed property, and even once they realize that they could be owed money from multiple states, they tend to do one quick search and think whatever the search results say is all there is to it. Sadly, not all unclaimed property sites are the same, and there is not one search that can check the databases of all states. Even when you break it down to the state level, the records are often very unreliable because they aren’t updated in real time.

Each state has its own laws that spell out when unclaimed properties must be handed over to the department that deals with these types of assets in that state. And each type of account (dormant bank accounts, lost or forgotten uncashed checks, stock or bonds, dividends & bond interest, insurance proceeds, utility refunds, safe deposit box contents, etc.) has its own unique dormancy period, which is the time that must pass before the monies are classified as “unclaimed”. For this reason, different money is turned over to each state all the time, and the states update their records whenever they have the manpower and time to do so. Because of this, anyone serious about finding all possible money claims must search frequently, in addition to learning where to search and where not to perform a search.

These hurdles, among others, can seem overwhelming to a confused beginner in the found money arena, but now searchers can use guides written by professionals in the field to jump the hurdles that often plague rookies. For those who think they can manage their cash better than their state treasurer’s department, you owe it to yourselves to learn all about the best ways to search and then get going ASAP.

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Vt. has $1.7 million in unclaimed tax refunds (Boston Globe)
The Internal Revenue Service says 2,200 Vermonters are eligible to share $1.7 million in unclaimed federal tax refunds.

Deadline is April 15 to claim old tax refund - Alexandria Daily Town Talk
WASHINGTON - Here’s something you don’t hear every day: The Internal Revenue Service wants to give some of you money. The agency issued a notice Tuesday saying about 23,800 Louisiana residents will lose income tax refunds with a median estimated …

Nebraska lawmakers to discuss axing treasurer’s office - Lincoln Journal Star
He says he introduced it to save the state money and that services now done by the office such as returning unclaimed property could be done by other state agencies. Current State Treasurer Shane Osborn opposes the measure even though he isn’t …

Millions in IRS refunds unclaimed - Tulsa World
Oklahoma taxpayers who are due the refunds must file the claim by April 15 or, by law, the refund is forfeited. Nationwide, unclaimed refunds totaling more than $1 … After that, the refund money becomes the property of the U.S. Treasury, the IRS …

Old tax refunds remain unclaimed - Leaf Chronicle
WASHINGTON —Here’s something you don’t hear every day: The Internal Revenue Service wants to give some of you money. The agency issued a notice Tuesday saying about 22,200 Tennesseans will lose income tax refunds with a median estimated value of …

IRS: $19M still unclaimed by Alabama taxpayers - MSN Money
The Internal Revenue Service said nearly $19 million in unclaimed 2006 federal income tax return money awaits 22,000 Alabamians. But for those 22,000 to collect, they must file a 2006 income tax return by April 15 of this year, said a news release …

The state of California’s unclaimed money program takes in approximately $300 million every year. What’s it to you? Well, if you or anyone you know is or ever was a resident of the Golden State (or ever had any type of business dealings, whether you knew it or not), a chunk of that massive pile of Cali missing money could easily be yours!

Under the state of California unclaimed property (or escheat) law, lost money such as forgotten checking and savings accounts, uncashed checks and money orders, mineral deposits, salary checks, cash and stock dividends, state of California unclaimed tax refunds, gift certificates, and other assets are passed along to the Treasury Dept. if their owners don’t locate them within a certain time period. This ‘dormancy period’ varies widely from state to state, but in Cali it is 3 years. These abandoned assets then go to the CA unclaimed property div, where they stay in the state’s general fund until returned to the rightful owners. This is where state officials who handled Cali unclaimed cash were criticized recently. Seems that they have been all to happy to locate and collect the lost funds from the various establishments holding them but showed less interest in contacting the actual owners in the Cali unclaimed money database.

One of the primary reasons for the government’s inability give back forgotten cash to residents, they claim, is that they can’t be tracked down. Problem is, who would think that people like Angelina Jolie, ZsaZsa Gabor, Gerri Halliwell, Victoria Beckham, Keanu Reeves, Brad Pitt, Adam Sandler, Marlon Brando and Jennifer Lopez could be hard to find? Their names and the names of several other famous people are just a few of the names in the Cali missing money list and yet they have not heard from the officials in the California Unclaimed Money Division. They are all owed checks for lost assets by Cali ranging in amount from hundreds to the thousands in Ms. Jolie’s case. This proves once again Cali state employees’ interest in holding this cash in the general fund for them to balance the budget deficit for as long as they possibly can. In fact, there was a recent ruling by a federal judge on CA abandoned assets, saying that the state was not making enough of an effort to locate the rightful owners and for a while halted the ability of the state to take and hold it until a new policy of reuniting it with the rightful owners has been adopted.

The total amount of unclaimed money in California averages five billion dollars annually - imagine the amount of interest that accrues for the state! Sacramento attorney Bill Palmer who has battled in many cases involving CA unclaimed money, said the state’s program was intended to be a lost and found of sorts for Californians. Instead, it has been turned into a profit generating ‘business’ in recent years.

The hold on the seizure of property by California has recently been lifted and the new CA State Controller, John Chiang, is making extra efforts in the form of widespread reforms in improving how his office deals with CA unclaimed money. There’s still a great need though for Californians and residents of all other states across the U.S. to learn about the presence of these monies and on how to do a thorough search for them.

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Treasurer delivers unclaimed check - Topeka Capital-Journal
Overland Park resident Gail Brown got a visit from Santa Claus on Friday. Well, actually it was state Treasurer Dennis McKinney. But he came bearing a gift. Specifically, a check for $78,666. It was unclaimed property from Brown’s mother’s retirement …

Kansas Treasurer Dennis McKinney plans visits to reunite people with unclaimed money - fox4kc.com
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — An Overland Park resident is about $79,000 richer after getting a visit from Kansas Treasurer Dennis McKinney. The treasurer’s office had spent five weeks trying to track down Gail Brown, who was owed money from a parent’s retirement account. McKinney says, “It’s not always

As the littlest state in the country, Rhode Island is justifiably known as “Little Rhody”, but there is nothing small about the amount of Rhode Island unclaimed money currently currently sitting in the RI Office of the General Treasurer. According to the office’s website, the state is now holding more than 124 million dollars of the peoples’ money, and the only thing stopping people from taking back their funds is knowledge and the ability to search correctly.

It is easy to understand why people have trouble accepting the reality of unclaimed funds because no one expects they can get free money. But “free” is not the proper term to describe these forgotten funds, because they technically already belong to the people who can claim them (except in situations where they come from a relative who passed away). So people who dismiss this phenomenon as some sort of scam are doing themselves a disservice by not realizing exactly where these properties come from.

According to the Office of the General Treasurer’s website, what follows are some of the most common forms of unclaimed properties in RI: account receivable credits and payables, insurance payments, safe deposit boxes, credit memos, gift certificates, stocks and dividends, bank accounts, refunds, wages. There are many other types, but those are the most common, and each is considered abandoned or “unclaimed” after a particular number of years of seeing no activity. After this dormancy period has passed, the holders have to to pass them along to the state for holding until the true owner makes a claim on them. The state never actually takes possession of them, which means there is not a time limit to claim missing money.

Even after learning the process by which funds become unclaimed, it is still tough to wrap our minds around the fact that there are hundreds of millions waiting to be found by RI residents, and tens of billions nationwide. It is tough to accept that people have simply forgotten about these properties, but the fact is they have. In fact experts estimate that in the United States 7 in 10 people are owed money. The difficulty is understanding how to track down and claim our cash.

More often than not, people get in their own way of locating their unclaimed funds by doing things like looking on the wrong sites and searching only one time. Not all unclaimed funds sites are equal. Many don’t have any actual missing money records, and even the handful that do often contain mostly outdated data. Even actual state records are notoriously not accurate due to the fact that they are not updated in real time. Given that assets are turned over all the time, and each type has a unique dormancy period, a listing for a given person’s name may not be added to the system until the day, week or month after they search, leaving them with the incorrect impression that they are not owed money.

Although in recent years RI has increased efforts to give back forgotten funds to the true owners, more money continues to come in than is returned to the owners, so the total will keep on growing, giving each citizen a greater chance of locating a claim. The state simply does not have the ability to efficiently track down everyone who has money coming to them so the best thing residents of RI can do is to study how to search like professional finders do, and then use those tactics to maximize their search potential.

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Haven’t filed a tax return in years? 18,900 Minnesotans owed unclaimed … - Hutchinson Daily Leader
Unclaimed refunds totaling more than $1.3 billion are awaiting nearly 1.4 million people who did not file a federal income tax return for 2006, the Internal Revenue Service announced today. However, to collect the money, a return for 2006 must be …

Treasurer delivers unclaimed check - Topeka Capital-Journal
Overland Park resident Gail Brown got a visit from Santa Claus on Friday. Well, actually it was state Treasurer Dennis McKinney. But he came bearing a gift. Specifically, a check for $78,666. It was unclaimed property from Brown’s mother’s retirement …

$43M in refunds unclaimed - Bridgeton News
Refunds of approximately $43 million are awaiting 39,900 New Jersey residents who did not file a federal income tax return for 2006, according to IRS officials. To collect that money, a 2006 return must be filed no later than April 15, 2010 …

In May 2007, IL State Treasurer State Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias stated that the state’s “Cash Dash” abandoned asset program currently holds nearly 1.4 Billion dollars in Illinois unclaimed money. The only thing getting between the cash and its true owners is the knowledge that it’s out there and the knowledge to locate it.

Sadly beyond just IL, state treasury departments across the country keep on taking in more unclaimed money every year than they hand back to the citizens. Because everyone believes in the old “if it’s too good to be true” saying, the majority of people refuse to believe that there are really tens of billions of dollars waiting to be claimed across the country. Even for those few who have realized the truth about unclaimed cash, the best way to track these monies down eludes them in most cases.

The Prairie is State is one of those rare states that holds over 1 billion dollars on its own, which means if you are a resident of IL then you have even better odds of tracking down a claim in your name, especially after you factor in that the state has less than 13 million people and there are more than 10 million names on the state’s IL list.

Although there are many more, IL lists the following as the most common sources of forgotten funds: unpaid wages or commissions, abandoned savings and checking accounts, bonds, stock, un-cashed dividends, mutual funds, credit balances, customer deposits or overpayments, safe deposit box contents, money orders, refunds, paid-up life insurance policies, travelers checks. People who have had or know someone who might have had one of these accounts at some point in the past is encouraged to search regularly.

The IL State Treasury has returned over $432 million since it took over the unclaimed money program in 1999, 84 million dollars of which was given back in 2006 alone, but with 1.4 Billion dollars waiting to be claimed and more coming in every year, the heap of cash will keep on growing.

Because money is always being added to the fund, it’s very important to search regularly, not just once. Money belonging to you might be added tomorrow, or next week, or next month, or depending on the type of property in five years if that’s the proper dormancy period. Each type of property has its own dormancy period in each state, after which state laws require the holder to hand it over to the state who will then hold on to it until the true owner comes forward to claim it.

Further, residents of IL might be owed unclaimed money in other states even if they have never resided in or even set foot in them. Items like insurance overpayments when an employer uses an out of state insurance company can result in found money located in other states. Issues often also arise when corporations’ headquarters are in another state.

The bottom line is that the state of IL is currently home to a massive amount of money that is owed to its residents who just need to learn the proper ways to search, where to search, and how often to search. Learning these search tips from locators with years of experience in this field can give you a boost in your abilities to locate your money.

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Kansas Treasurer Dennis McKinney plans visits to reunite people with unclaimed money - fox4kc.com
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — An Overland Park resident is about $79,000 richer after getting a visit from Kansas Treasurer Dennis McKinney. The treasurer’s office had spent five weeks trying to track down Gail Brown, who was owed money from a parent’s retirement account. McKinney says, “It’s not always

Georgia holds millions in unclaimed money - Chattanooga Times Free Press
ATLANTA — The state of Georgia is holding on to nearly $985 million that rightfully belongs to state departments and taxpayers, according to the Georgia Department of Revenue. ”In these tough economic times, Georgians cannot afford to just let …

Treasurer delivers unclaimed check - Topeka Capital-Journal
Overland Park resident Gail Brown got a visit from Santa Claus on Friday. Well, actually it was state Treasurer Dennis McKinney. But he came bearing a gift. Specifically, a check for $78,666. It was unclaimed property from Brown’s mother’s retirement …

Federal Money to Help People on Welfare Get Jobs Goes Unclaimed - GPB
ATLANTA — Congress has set aside billions of dollars to help states find jobs for people on welfare, but most states including Georgia haven’t claimed their share. Many states don’t touch federal money intended to help welfare recipients get jobs …

Kansas Treasurer Dennis McKinney plans visits to reunite people with … - fox4kc.com
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — An Overland Park resident is about $79,000 richer after getting a visit from Kansas Treasurer Dennis McKinney. The treasurer’s office had spent five weeks trying to track down Gail Brown, who was owed money from a parent’s …

UNCLAIMED MONEY: Locals owed over $500,000 - Ballarat Courier
THE STATE Revenue Office wants to reunite Ballarat residents with more than $500,000 in unclaimed money. According to Commissioner of State Revenue Paul Broderick, within the city of Ballarat there are currently 10,000 claims worth over $500,000 …

Do you have any unclaimed money? - heartland connection.com
KIRKSVILLE, MO — Treasurer Clint Zweifel was in Kirksville on Saturday marketing the Missouri House Democrats “Road to the Majority Tour” in northeast Missouri. Zweifel said Missouri has a strong field of democrats running in 2010 who …

Bank Goes Extra Mile To Keep Cash In Client’s Hands (Hartford Business Journal)
Bank account holders beware: If it’s been three years since your last transaction, one local bank is warning that your money will soon be turned over to the state.

Do you have any unclaimed money? (KTVO Kirksville)
As of January 2010, the Missouri Sate Treasure’s office was holding more than $600 million in unclaimed assets.

The most southern of the Dakotas may be home to the country’s treasure that is Mt. Rushmore, but ND has its own treasure that is nothing to sneeze at. According to the website of the State Land Department, there is currently more than $23 million in North Dakota unclaimed money, waiting to be reunited with the residents who lost track of it some time in their lives. The one thing standing between these citizens and their cash, beyond knowing about the fact that these assets exist, is the know-how to locate them and reclaim them.

North Dakota Residents are blessed to live in a state that is among the top 5 in the nation for percentage of unclaimed money given back to residents. Also keep in mind that the state has one of the lowest populations in the nation, at just over 640 thousand. What this means is that ND residents have excellent odds of locating and claiming back assets that are rightfully theirs.

The main rule of searching for unclaimed money is to search frequently. One of the biggest mistakes searchers often make is to search only once on the first website they come to that has a search box and they end their search there. This does not factor in that the vast majority of missing money sites do not have accurate data, and even the official state databases are often slow to be updated. This is an issue, not only due to the fact that an employee in a state office has to physically input the listing once it has been given to the state, but because there are different periods of time which must go by, unique to each type of missing money, before they are handed over to the state.

Some of the most common types of missing money are stocks, dormant savings and checking accounts, mutual funds, bonds, wages, refunds, salary, payroll, paid-up life insurance policies, money orders, commissions, deposits, death benefits, uncashed checks, insurance payments, dividends, and others. The majority of those have dormancy periods of 1 to 5 years, which means that if it has only been a year or two when a person searches; they would not find a record for an asset that has a dormancy period of 3 or more years.

In addition to needing to search the correct sites often, many people do not realize that they ought to search listings outside of ND. Believe it or not, a person could actually have never been outside of the state of ND, but have assets owed to them in different states. This occurs when money from insurance companies or employers come from other states. Often times the actual corporate headquarters for an employer exists in a state separate from where a particular employee works. Because of this, unclaimed monies being held by institutions in these situations will be handed over to the proper division of the company’s home state’s treasury dept. What this means is that ND will not ever have any record of this cash, so a North Dakotan who wants to find and claim it will need to use the same search strategies in other states.

These are only a few of the more common issues that plague the searches of uninformed ND citizens. But people can get over these issues, and a number of others, by spending just a little time educating themselves on the search strategies used by professional searchers before putting their own feet in the water.

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Millions In Money, Property Sits Unclaimed In Kansas - fox4kc.com
TOPEKA, Kan. - Kansas wants to return money you probably didn’t realize you lost and you could be hundreds or thousands of dollars richer in seconds. $200 million in money and unclaimed property sits in Topeka just waiting for its owners. State …

Editorial: Judicial jackpots - Columbus Dispatch
The General Assembly is considering changing the way that cash awards are distributed in class-action lawsuits in Ohio, but it should drop the idea. The proposal, involving a legal concept called cy pres , seems worthy on its face - helping out cash …

Help available in Tempe to claim tax money (The Arizona Republic)
Tempe Earned income Tax Credit program offers free tax preparation.

Most people know Tennessee is famous for its country music and world famous BBQ, but the state is also home to a lesser-known treasure - unclaimed property. In fact the TN Treasury Department adds tens of millions of dollars in Tennessee Unclaimed Money to its rolls annually, and just a fraction of it ever gets reunited with the rightful owners. In turn, this pile of cash grows larger and larger annually.

The TN Treasury Department %took in% roughly $40 million in unclaimed property in 2006 alone, and was only able to return $20 million to the rightful owners. That means that another $20 million was added to the already swollen pile of cash that remains unclaimed. This trend of returning just a fraction of what the state takes in is consistent across the country because of a lack of education about these monies. The fact is, the majority of citizens are just not aware of the tens of billions out there waiting to be found.

States do things like publishing names annually in local newspapers of the residents who are owed cash and setting up tables at local fairs to help awareness, but the message still just reaches a small fraction of the population. Even among the few who are in the know about the potential to track down these lost assets, very few know where to start their search. A lot of people fall in to the trap of believing that any old missing money web site will do, while others don’t understand that they need to search more than one time. There are a lot of issues that uninformed searchers deal with, but those are the most common.

People tend to search the wrong lost money sites because they are under the impression that any web site that lets them type their name in to a search box will do. This couldn’t be more incorrect. For starters, there are very few sites that actually have the official state listings, and even those are generally inaccurate because they aren’t updated in real time. There are many types of unclaimed property, but according to the State Treasurer’s office, TN’s most common are stock certificates, bank accounts, unclaimed wages, checks, gift certificates, refunds. Each type has a unique “dormancy period”, which is the amount of time that mus go by before the holder has to hand the assets over to the state to be held for the owners. Because of this, a search may not show any claims due to the fact that the fund won’t be turned over until the next month or year, or even for a number of years. This is why people should search frequently to be sure they’ve exhausted all potential sources.

On top of the issues mentioned above, beginners will run in to a lot of stumbling blocks that will annoy them in their searches. The only way for TN residents to be certain that they are performing thorough searches is to educate themselves before they begin their search. The best way to do this is to mimic what others are doing. Why make the usual beginner’s mistakes when you can learn from experienced searchers and duplicate their techniques?

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Edward Palonek reminds residents of Indiana to collect their unclaimed … - PRLog (free press release)
Don’t delay in starting your search at foundmoney.com for unclaimed money, you may be richer than you think.

Despite returning a record 26.2 million dollars in Connecticut unclaimed money in the year 2006, there are still tens of millions of dollars in abandoned assets waiting to be located and claimed by the true owners - average people who simply abandoned or forgot about these properties for one reason or another.

Recent efforts by the CT State Treasurer’s “The Big List” program have given back $110 million back to CT residents in just the last 8 years, but much more money continued to come in than was returned so the mounds of unclaimed property held by the gov. keep on growing. Due to the fact that new unclaimed cash outpaces the return rate, the odds of finding a claim for any given name are getting better every day.

A lot of people wonder how unclaimed property could be real, because the fact that across the nation there are billions of dollars waiting to be found by the rightful owners simply seems impossible. How could these people abandon their money? Are they crazy? No, they’re just normal people, and it has been estimated that 7 out of every 10 citizens are owed some kind of claim!

So how is all this money being abandoned without the owners knowing it? In most cases it is as simple as forgetting about a savings or checking account that was not a primary account, or not providing a forwarding address to all the necessary people when a person relocates. Further, the State Treasurer’s site lists the following as common types of lost assets in CT: safe deposit box contents, stocks, life insurance policies, travelers’ checks or money orders, deposits, uncashed checks, and bonds or mutual fund shares.

As these various types of accounts lay untouched past their dormancy periods (unique for each account type in each state), they are turned over to the state to be held until the owner comes forward to claim them. So if the dormancy period on a particular account doesn’t run out for another few years, a person searching today will not find a record of their abandoned assets, even though it’s out there in pre-escheat, which means that the dormancy period has not yet expired. Further, states do not have a uniform law dictating when the records are actually updated in their databases so a person could in theory search and not find anything, while the record is added the following day, week, month or year. The only real way to be thorough about your search is to search often.

In addition to limiting themselves to a single search, inexperienced searchers often search just the state they reside in, not knowing that there is a possibility for unclaimed property owed to them in states they have never lived in or even been to, for a variety of reasons such as insurance company headquarters or employers’ corporate headquarters.

The issues mentioned above, among others, can be worked around once people learn about proper search tactics. Using the advice and guidance of experienced unclaimed asset finders often makes the difference in whether or not a person with limited knowledge in this area finds all money owed to them or not.

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Comptroller: Scammer tried to claim dead Irvington woman’s money (The Journal News)
An upstate woman has been convicted of fraud after trying to get about $1,200 in unclaimed funds from the state by falsely claiming she was the niece of an Irvington woman who had recently died, the state comptroller and a local prosecutor said Friday.

Missouri lawmakers have unclaimed funds held by state - Jefferson City News Tribune Online
About one out of every seven Missouri lawmakers has some money waiting for them in the capital, and many may not even know it. An Associated Press review of the Missouri treasurer’s online unclaimed property database showed that 12 senators, 16 …

Woman finds unclaimed 1978 insurance check - Dayton Daily News
LAUDERHILL, Fla. — An 85-year-old South Florida woman who went looking for a photo of her ex-husband says she found a $17,500 insurance claim check from 1978 instead. Barbara Cosgrove found the check, dated Jan. 23, 1978, in an unopened envelope …

The Investigators: Missing MED money FOUND - WMC-TV
MEMPHIS (WMC TV) - City suits, state pols and hospital ‘crats toured the Regional Medical Center of Memphis Friday to encourage raising money for the cash-strapped, publicly funded hospital. They probably should have toured the Tennessee Treasury …

Business Spotlight: Indiana Benefits Recovery (Fort Wayne Journal Gazette)
Address: 1830 Wayne Trace At a glance: Indiana Benefits Recovery finds unclaimed money and then searches for the rightful owner, sometimes the next-of-kin for someone who is deceased. The company makes its income by taking a percentage of the money found with life insurance companies, banks, pensions, estates and other sources.

Federal Money to Help People on Welfare Get Jobs Goes Unclaimed (Georgia Public Broadcasting)
Congress has set aside billions of dollars to help states find jobs for people on welfare, but most states including Georgia haven’t claimed their share. The federal government has doled out just $1 billion of the $5 billion package. The program will expire at the end of September. Many states…

Maine, the Pine Tree State, offers more than just the terrifyingly cold winters that the northeastern most part of the United States is known for. As of June 2007, the State Treasurer’s Office was holding over $131 million in Maine unclaimed money, divided up over more than 540 thousand accounts. That’s a lot of clams, or lobsters in Maine’s case.

Abandoned property is deemed “unclaimed” after it sits dormant for a specific period of time. Every state has its own unique dormancy periods for each type of property. In Maine, dormancy periods range from 1 year to 15 years, varying by account type, but the majority of Maine dormancy periods are three years. State law requires that assets be handed over to the state for safe keeping after the appropriate dormancy period has passed. At this point, the state treasurer is in charge of adding the record to their system, making it available for the true owner to locate and claim it.

Though tough to believe, across the country there really are tens of billions in unclaimed funds, waiting to be tracked down by the rightful owners. Missing money is often dismissed as a scam or myth because people just can’t accept that Americans could really just forget about or abandon that much money. All citizens need to do is contact their state treasurer to get confirmation that this cash are out there.

One main reason that unclaimed assets totals keep on growing in all states is because the states are consistently inefficient when it comes to giving these properties back to the citizens. A lot of states have stepped up efforts to put money back in the pockets of the people it is owed to, yet the amount handed over to the state each year continues to vastly outpace the amount given back to the people.

Aside from the fact that the majority of people still are not aware of the joys of claiming forgotten money, those that are usually do not have a clue how to search. Every unclaimed funds site is different and only a few are actually legitimate and maintain accurate records. Even state records are consistently inaccurate due to the fact that they are not updated in real time. While funds are handed over to the state constantly, there will be no searchable record until an employee physically adds the record to the system. On top of that, as noted, there are so many different dormancy periods that assets are always being handed over, so Maine’s records are constantly needing to be updated.

The number one rule in looking for missing cash is to search regularly or one can never be confident in the completeness of their search. But inaccurate records are only the beginning of the hurdles that often get in the way of average people just starting out on their search for forgotten properties.

Learning tactics from experts in tracking down unclaimed funds can jumpstart your search and help reunite you with your cash quicker than the average, uninformed citizen starting out without any direction. People really hoping to explore all possible claims would be smart to educate themselves before starting the process of locating abandoned assets.

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MO lawmakers: How’d you miss this money? - Kansas City Star
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — About one out of every seven Missouri lawmakers has some money waiting for them in the capital, and many may not even know it. An Associated Press review of the Missouri treasurer’s online unclaimed property database …

Unclaimed $2.5M Ind. jackpot has winner after all (Boston Globe)
An Indianapolis couple who say they left a winning lottery ticket on a desk for six months have claimed a $2.5 million Hoosier Lotto jackpot.

$2.5M Hoosier lotto jackpot still unclaimed - KABC
INDIANAPOLIS — It’s enough money to pay off a mortgage. A dozen mortgages, actually. Or invest, retire and live comfortably. You could even throw a crazy Hollywood-style party in the heartland with that kind of cash. But the $2.5 million Hoosier …

Unclaimed Lottery Jackpot - WILX-TV
The Whites say their first priority for the money is to pay for college for their two children. The winning ticket was sold at a convenience store on the south side of Indianapolis.

As of October 2007, it was determined by the Office of the State Treasury of S. Carolina that the state is currently holds more than 200 million dollars that is owed to residents who only need to come forward and claim it, if they know how to track it down. Despite improved efforts to reunite South Carolina unclaimed money with the rightful owners, which lead to a record annual return of $900,000 in Sept. 2007, the pile of cash grows larger every year.

Annually, S. Carolina, like most states, continues to take in more money than it is able to give back to the rightful owners. The primary problem is the fact that the majority of people are completely unaware that these assets even exist, which goes without saying, or they’d not ever have forgotten about them long enough for them to be classified “unclaimed”. Even the few who are aware of the billions of dollars in unclaimed money all across the country generally don’t have a clue how to go about locating them.

S. Carolina is what is called a “custodial state”, and that means that they don’t ever actually own your assets, they just hold them for the owners, and there is never a time frame under which you are required to claim your cash. While there are many different types of unclaimed money, the state treasurer lists the following as the most common kinds under the Palmetto Payback Program: uncashed checks (including paychecks), dormant bank accounts, forgotten utility deposits, unclaimed insurance proceeds, unexchanged shares of stock, and uncashed dividend checks.

S. Carolina unclaimed money is given to the state treasury after long periods of being inactive. These periods of time are called “dormancy periods”, and each type of unclaimed cash has its own. Many are just 1 year, but many years must pass for some types of funds to be given to the state. On top of that, and employee of the state has to manually input the claim information in to the state’s system %if there is to be% public, searchable record. For these reasons, among others, it’s very important that people who are serious about locating their abandoned assets, search often and search on the proper websites.

Many websites claim to have a database, but more often than not it is not very reliable. Not only are they often not current, but many of them are just totally fake. These websites use “teaser” searches to entice a searcher by convincing them that they’re due X dollars in mising money, when that dollar amount was generated at random. Basically it is a misleading sales tactic.

Beyond not knowing where to search, searchers also need to realize that they should search outside of S. Carolina. A lot of people have moved to S. Carolina after having spent most of their lives in one or a number of other states. Others may have always lived in S. Carolina, but if they had a policy with an insurance company out of state or the corporate headquarters of an employer is based in a different state, then there is a good chance that they’re still owed assets, but S. Carolina would never have a record of these assets. It’s very important to check the state listings of every state where somone might have had any type of business relationship.

It cannot be said enough, having the help of unclaimed money pros in your search for unclaimed money is vitally important. An expert in this field can help you overcome all the problems that plague many searchers, including the few mentioned in this article.

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Missouri lawmakers have unclaimed funds held by state - Jefferson City News Tribune Online
About one out of every seven Missouri lawmakers has some money waiting for them in the capital, and many may not even know it. An Associated Press review of the Missouri treasurer’s online unclaimed property database showed that 12 senators, 16 …

AP: 30 lawmakers have unclaimed property in state - News-Leader.com
Jefferson City — About one out of every seven Missouri lawmakers has some money waiting for them in the capital, and many may not even know it. An Associated Press review of the Missouri treasurer’s online unclaimed property database showed that 12 …

Out of luck: $2.5M Hoosier jackpot goes unclaimed (AP via Yahoo! News)
Hoosier lottery players have been digging through their trash, scouring their cars and bringing fistfuls of old tickets, some in shoeboxes, to an Indianapolis store, hoping they would find the winning — but unclaimed — $2.5 million jackpot ticket.

On Your Side: Earned Income Tax Credit available to many - WRDW-TV
Unclaimed money. This is no scam. We’re talking about an IRS tax credit that you could be eligible for. One out of every four people in Georgia didn’t take advantage of it last year. A family with 3 kids making less than $43,000 can get a $5,600 …

Among the tens of billions of dollars in unclaimed property in the United States, the state of OH is one of the few states to be home to more than one billion of it. According to the OH Department of Commerce’s Division of Unclaimed Funds, that $1 Billion is spread over three and a half million different accounts. Even though thousands of these unclaimed accounts are returned to their rightful owners every year, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, OH adds another 200,000 accounts every year, worth many more millions.

As with the majority of states, OH faces difficulties in returning unclaimed property to Ohioans for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is disbelief. To put it simply, most people simply are not aware of missing money and those that have heard of it, often think it is some type of scam, unless they’ve heard it straight from the source. But even those people that have accepted the reality of these billions of dollars in abandoned assets generally do not know the first thing about locating these properties.

The Div of Unclaimed Funds in OH holds the following as its mission statement: “To improve the quality of service to our customers by collecting unclaimed property equitably, managing the property wisely and effectively, and returning it timely to the rightful owners.” The Div also provides the following list of some of the most common types of unclaimed property in OH - unreturned rent and utility deposits, unpaid insurance policies, dormant savings and checking accounts, credit memos, forgotten layaway deposits, underlying shares of stock, unclaimed wages or commissions, securities, undelivered and uncashed stock dividends, credit balances, uncashed checks, intangible contents of safe deposit boxes.

If a resident of the state of OH wants to be thorough in their search for missing money, there are a handful of steps they can take to give themselves a leg up. What it all boils down to is studying and learning about the process. Figuring out where to search and when to search is key to successful searches. Did you know that not all unclaimed property web sites are the same? Did you know that the records aren’t updated on a schedule?

If residents of the Buckeye State hope to take their piece of the billion dollar unclaimed property pie, the name of the game is to search regularly. If a person searches on Monday and doesn’t find anything, there is a likelyhood that they’ll call it quits that moment. But what if a listing for missing money in their name isn’t added until Tuesday? Or maybe the following month? Or year? Each type of unclaimed property has its own amount of time which must go by before it’s considered “unclaimed” and handed over to the state. The majority of these dormancy periods are between 1 to 5 years, but many are longer, so it is clear that tracking down lost assets isn’t a one shot deal.

Further explanations on the tips mentioned, and dozens of others can be discovered if a citizen enlists the help of an unclaimed property pro in their search for Ohio unclaimed money, which is highly recommended to make sure that all resources and potential sources of cash have been explored.

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On Your Side: Earned Income Tax Credit available to many - WRDW-TV
Unclaimed money. This is no scam. We’re talking about an IRS tax credit that you could be eligible for. One out of every four people in Georgia didn’t take advantage of it last year. A family with 3 kids making less than $43,000 can get a $5,600 …

MO lawmakers: How’d you miss this money? - Kansas City Star
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — About one out of every seven Missouri lawmakers has some money waiting for them in the capital, and many may not even know it. An Associated Press review of the Missouri treasurer’s online unclaimed property database …

Out of luck: $2.5M Hoosier jackpot goes unclaimed (WXOW 19 La Crosse)
Hoosier lottery players have been digging through their trash, scouring their cars and bringing fistfuls of old tickets, some in shoeboxes, to an Indianapolis store, hoping they would find the winning - but unclaimed - $2.5…

Fond du Lac woman gets more than $100,000 in unclaimed property - WKOW-TV.com
MADISON (WKOW) — A Fond du Lac woman is getting a surprise from the State Treasury. State Treasurer Dawn Marie Sass will be sending a check for $102,774.70 to a Fond du Lac resident who didn’t know the state was holding her unclaimed property. The …