You May Have Money in an Old Account You Lost or Forgot; Here's How to Locate Unclaimed Assets

• Author: Jessica Williams
• Posted: 2024-06-05

It is usually beneficial to locate a fresh cash source during financial turmoil. One frequently overlooked approach to gain additional cash is to tap into possibly unclaimed monies you could have amassed over time without ever recognizing them. Even better, this cash may be found pretty simply and in a variety of locations.
 

What Exactly Are Unclaimed Funds?

Unclaimed monies are any sums of money or assets due to you by a government office, company, or other body that you have not yet collected. You may have abandoned monies from a bankruptcy case, a former employment, or even tax payments. Cash, security deposits, cheques, money orders, and the items inside safe deposit boxes are examples of unclaimed property.

When you miss claiming your cash, they often enter what is called a dormancy phase, which is the time between when financial firms report an unclaimed asset and when the government decides those assets are abandoned.

Most states have a five-year dormancy period, so retrieving your cash before that time runs out is critical. When this period ends, the state takes possession of your property. Following that, you must go through a procedure to claim your cash from the government.
 

Why Is It Important?

Unclaimed money that is legitimately yours can help you make important progress toward your monetary objectives, such as purchasing a home or another large-ticket item. Although the sum of unclaimed funds you have might not always be large, in some situations, Unclaimed monies have the potential to change people's lives.

You may believe you got no unclaimed money or only a little sum, yet you may have significant amounts of money that you are unaware of.

As per CNN, there are several incidents of abandoned pension funds, which is significant because it is money used for retirement. Someone claimed $32 million in unclaimed stock sales once. It should be noted, however, that not every case of unclaimed funds will be life-changing – but a little still be useful.
 

How to Locate Unclaimed Funds

Unclaimed money can be easily found by searching by state at Unclaimed.org. Choose your state and provide personal information, such as your first and final name. If you're looking on behalf of a company, you can input the company's name. You must contact your state's revenue agency to obtain a tax refund check.

Tax refunds are a major source of unclaimed monies. Assume you were qualified for a federal refund check but failed to submit it; your refund will go unclaimed. You should submit a return if national taxes were taken from your salary or if you qualified for the EITC. The IRS may owe you money if your refund went unclaimed or was never sent to you.

Another technique to uncover unclaimed cash is to see if your employer violated any labor regulations, which means you're entitled to unpaid wages that the Department of Labor might have collected for you. If you believe your company owes you money, examine the DOL registry of unclaimed workers' money. Unpaid salaries are recorded and kept on the portal for three years. You may also look for unclaimed benefits from companies that ended their operations or terminated a defined pension scheme.

Unclaimed funds might also include old investments and bank accounts. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation can help you look for unclaimed funds from bankrupt banks. You may also locate unclaimed cash from failed credit unions. If you have unclaimed cash in a bank, you may also check Unclaimed.org or MissingMoney.com.

SEC also keeps track of instances where a corporation or individual owes money to investors. To discover unclaimed funds from savings bonds and how to restore a lost or damaged savings bond, go to TreasuryHunt.gov.

Make a point of also looking for unclaimed cash following bankruptcy proceedings. This may be accomplished by utilizing the ucf.uscourts.gov portal.
 

How to Deal with Claimed Funds

Your circumstances ultimately determine the best approach to use money from unclaimed monies. If you do not have an emergency reserve, the newly claimed funds should be utilized to create one. If, on the contrary, you're in a good financial situation, have a fully loaded rainy day fund, and are settling off your debts every month, it's a smart idea to put the extra cash into a high-yield bank account or an investment.