Searching For Your Unclaimed Money & Property
| by Jim Wang |  Print Article
 Email Article
 Share on Facebook |
If you’ve ever rented an apartment, you’ve left a deposit… but did you get that back before you left? They said they’d mail it… but did you actually get it? How about the utility company, did you get your deposit back from them? What about those six months you lived in another state, were you entitled to a state income tax refund? Did you actually get it? Unclaimed or abandoned property departments exist in every state and through free online searches you can find a ton of money you may have inadvertently left behind. I haven’t lived in enough places to have left behind any hard earned cash (I looked, no luck though) but you might have.
Below is a comprehensive list of every state’s (even D.C. and Puerto Rico) website that has a search for unclaimed property. Take a few minutes and see if you’ve discovered any cash and leave a comment if you do! I didn’t find any but perhaps you can find a nice fat check somewhere with your name on it. 
Don’t pay for a service that finds unclaimed property, the information they use is publicly and freely available!
{ 10 comments, please add your thoughts now! }
 By Jim |
Related Posts |
Stumble It!
Bookmark
Send to Twitter
Tags: Government, Unclaimed Property
Jul 02, 2005 | Read more in Government
Like this article? Get all the latest articles sent to your email for free every day. Enter your email address and click "Subscribe." Your email will only be used for this daily subscription and you can unsubscribe anytime.
oh man, I highly recommend people search the list.
some people will be very surprised how much unclaimed money and properties there are out there. its ridiculous.
which reminds me i never got my deposit back from my roomate.. ack. oh well.
I am still waiting to get my money back from MD. (Hi Jim!) 12 bloody weeks! Can you believe that? It can’t be about the float. I think its just beauracratic lunacy. But that $147 bucks is found money. I need to add it to my todo list to follow up on that Tuesday morning.
Hey buddy, are you talking about the state income tax refund check? I got mine about a month or so ago, those guys must be lagging… or did you search one of these lists and actually find cash? That’d be pretty sweet. I looked for me, my parents, some of my friends but couldn’t find a dime.
Did you ever go to any other tax sales? I think I might start doing research on foreclosures… from what I’ve been reading on some other blogs, markets in Las Vegas, Boston, and Cali are cooling off (and everyone flooding Texas, which according to the FDIC has had no real appreciation in housing prices!).
Ha, I just looked for money from my sister in Mass. and I think I might have found some… we’ll see.
I just found numerous occurrences of my name (including middle initial) in one of the states where I used to live. Unfortunately, none of them is really me.
The Georgia link is broken. Here’s a working link:
Georgia
Jim,
No, my father and I have the same name (I’m Jr.) so he went searching for some reason and found some money that Maryland owed me. I sent them the information back in April (IIRC) and they said 12 weeks until it came through. This is definitely not the tax refund.
As for the RE stuff, I’m going to setup some meetings with an agent in PG county and a RE lawyer. Both are associates of a friend of mine who used to work for the agent. I’m taking a year to study the market and get familiar with the laws and gotchas.
I’ve been watching the info about cooling out west. Texas is definitely seeing that increased interest too. But I don’t think real action will start until next year anyway. And I’m not prepared (yet), both informationally and financially, to dive in. I’m putting away money monthly into my emergency account, and I plan to transfer my old 401(k) into a Roth IRA with an independent trustee in order to invest in RE and RE products (liens, foreclosures, etc.) within the IRA. So I want to fully fund that through 2007 along with the current 401(k) and emergency funds *before* I take on anything as capital intensive as RE. BUT I do work with a guy who knows a guy who can probably get me into some hard money lending, so once I get the 401(k) -> Roth conversion completed, and the funding thru the end of 2005, I’ll look at having my Roth make hard money loans. Also bought Cash Flow 101 with a co-worker and have been playing that on Wednesday nights (as suggested by Shaun over at shaunsre.blogspot.com). So things are coming together. I’ll probably have more tax lien info to share by summer’s end.
I thought I might have found my sister some money but no dice. Massachusetts got back to her within a week so that’s pretty good turnaround time regardless.