Unclaimed Property Blog

Usually when one says they have debt this is taken as a negative. However, there could be more to this debt than meets the eye.

Not all debt is alike—and not all debt is bad. It’s very reasonable to carry a mortgage or a car loan. What is needed is that you pay attention to the cost of the debt. If you have a revolving debt on a credit card that’s charging you 18% per year, you’re in a bad situation. If your student loan is costing you 6% per year, that’s not as worrisome.

It seems that everyone has different views on how to spend money. What do you do with money that has been dormant and unclaimed for many years? Recently the UK has made known how it wishes to handle its unclaimed assets.

Chancellor Gordon Brown said in his pre-budget report that banks and building societies had agreed that unclaimed assets held in accounts will be diverted to help improve youth services and financial education. It said banks could have an option to focus on their local community charities.

Dormant accounts will be defined as those untouched for 15 years.

If you have ever felt like there was too much hassle to getting a rebate, you may be correct. Read on for how this could be the case.

Brian Grow, author of “The Great Rebate Runaround,” found in his research that companies are not eager to give out rebate checks and have many ways to keep them from you. It is not uncommon to ask consumers to send in copies of their sales receipt multiple times or to hold on to the rebate check for several months, hoping you will never bother to follow up on it.

Now you can determine if that jewelery or rare coin you “found” is really lost, mislaid or abandoned property.

Property Law: Lost, Mislaid, & Abandoned Property

In the common law of property, personal belongings that have left the possession of their rightful owners without having directly entered the possession of another person are deemed to be lost, mislaid, or abandoned, depending on the circumstances under which they were found by the next party to come into possession of them. The rights of a finder of such property are determined in part by the status in which it is found. Because these classifications have developed under the ancient and ofttimes archaic common law of England, they turn on fine and nuanced distinctions.

There are many different rules and regulations concerning the use of gift cards. Will it expire is the most common question regarding gift cards. Another concern is if there is a service fee. Then that one lingering question—when the card has expired and was not used, who has ownership of the money?

Q: Can a business that has issued a gift certificate for a product or service put an expiration date on it after receiving payment in full?

A: Yes, businesses do have this right.

On Tuesday December 13th, CashUnclaimed.com Founder, Mr. Bill McIntosh, donated his unclaimed cash to ensure that the Whittier Women’s and Children’s Crisis Shelter have a happier holiday season. Mr. McIntosh discovered he had unclaimed money after a recent search on his newly updated website, www.cashunclaimed.com.

An estimated $25 billion of unclaimed money is sitting unbeknownst to the moneys’ owners, while many Americans could use financial assistance this Christmas. In the spirit of spreading joy and love for the holidays, CashUnclaimed contacted the owners of unclaimed property and requested a donation of the found money to this women and children’s shelter. Several of those contacted did make a donation to this worthy cause as it does provide a hotline, crisis shelter and protection, meals, clothing and much more to battered women and children.

A New Jersey woman has discovered that her grandparents had an IRA account that dates back to 1990 or even earlier. She has questions on this so she asked John W. Schoen, Senior Producer at MSNBC. Here is what was asked and his response:

Q: My grandmother handed me some IRA deposit receipts/certificates that belong to herself and my grandfather. My grandfather’s certificates are from Chemical Bank and are dated 1983-1987. My grandmother has one receipt dated 1990. I’ve called Chase Bank and all a representative could tell me was, “...maybe she could have rolled the monies over into another account…” because he did not see and IRA accounts in either name.

EBay, Massachusetts and unclaimed property do not sound like subjects that should be together, however, they were.

Various pieces of unclaimed property in Massachusetts has now become available to online consumers through government-sponsored auctions using eBay to facilitate its transactions. That is the relatinship with theses three subjects.

State Treasurer Timothy Cahill was on hand to kick off the auction and said eBay would allow the state to raise funds from all over the world, on a scale that was impossible just years ago.

Some states publish a list of rightful owners to unclaimed property, but in Massachusetts one woman found several relatives had money due them and they were not on the published list.

The woman, from Revere, MA wrote a letter to the Boston Globe. She had done a web search and found that her husband had some abandoned property coming to him. The funny thing is that his name never appeared in the published listings in the paper.

When she did further research she found a cousin and the cousin’s husband also had abandoned property but weren’t listed in the paper.