Increase Income With The Best Ways To Find Unclaimed Money
Unclaimed money may be waiting for you, but you’ll never know it if you don’t know where to look. In today’s highly mobile society, people change locations and jobs more frequently than ever. Often, their finances can’t keep up with them. Money owed to you can get left behind or lost without your being aware of it.
Governmental efforts to reunite lost money with its legitimate owners are often minimal. Normally, you’d have to be aware that you’d lost it to begin with and then know the correct procedure to recover it before any government help could be useful. Many people don’t take an active role in trying to find missing money because they believe that, if they had any unclaimed funds, the federal government would notify them or assist them. The sad fact is, no federal agency exists to take on this responsibility and there is no central federal database containing names of persons with missing money. At the state level, while banks, public utilities and many other institutions are required to report unclaimed funds, the methods to discover if you are included on a list of recipients and then what steps you need to take to reclaim the funds differ widely from state to state. Remember that missing money may be in any state where you once resided or even in states where you never lived—for example, a state where a relative who might have left you an inheritance resided.
Experts in the field attribute most cases of lost money to very simple causes: A change of address that wasn’t filed properly, or notices of unclaimed funds that may have been received but were discarded because the recipient did not understand the purpose of the notice. Still, lost money can be very difficult for an individual to track because it may originate from very diverse sources. It may be proceeds from an inheritance from a long-lost relative you hadn’t heard from in decades, or life insurance money from someone who included you as a beneficiary without informing you. Perhaps you left a job without returning for the final paycheck. Persons in creative arts may find that some work in the past has accrued royalties that have been accumulating without their knowledge. And many times, the results of a missing money search may turn up funds like unclaimed deposits for utility services, travelers checks that were never redeemed or long forgotten bank accounts that have been inactive for years.
Luckily, the private sector offers a better solution to find missing money. A number of online companies will perform a missing money search to scan databases of all states for unclaimed funds in your name. These companies can access all state information from one centralized source. A do-it-yourself method, on the other hand, is rarely cost-efficient as the average individual would have to contact each state individually in the entire country.
If a preliminary search turns up missing money that may be due you, you’ll be informed. By paying a reasonable fee to the online service and providing additional information to verify that the funds are in fact in your name, a report will be generated showing the location of all missing money on a state-by-state basis and including links that will connect you directly with the appropriate agency in each state where you can claim those lost assets.
