Millions of people in the United States go for years without knowing that they’re owed piles of money. This money comes either from overpaid taxes or unknown wills that are executed as long lost relatives pass without their knowledge, and the list only grows from there.
More than $40 billion is simply waiting to be accounted for across the nation due to some sort of mix up in processing, a move, or through standard withholding practices that were never accounted for on the back end. Unclaimed money often sits in trust accounts or within corporate or government bank accounts for years before the rightful owners are made aware of the windfall due to them.
So how can you tell if any unclaimed money belongs to you?
When you begin searching
The trouble that most Americans find in searching for their unclaimed salary, tax refunds, or other payouts is that the funds can be almost anywhere. So beginning the search can be a challenge that prevents many of us from ever starting.
Often times, the idea of lost money owed back to us can seem like a dubious proposition. We work incredibly hard for our money, and most Americans (although generally skeptical about their retirement security) are still on track to join the 80 percent of retirees living comfortably today. Financial issues tend to be the ones we inflate the most, considering that financial consideration plays such a large role in our daily lives.
So, the first thing to remember when starting a search for these unclaimed funds is that this is not a scam of some sort. As wild as it might seem, money does simply get lost in the shuffle, and far more often than we would like to think. This is why conducting periodic financial reviews and seeking out potentially lost capital every few months, quarterly, or even yearly is something that we should all be doing already.
Just like the savings account you are carefully cultivating, this lost money is yours, and you deserve to claim it back.
Use the right tools
A great way to really maximize your search results is to employ a third party site. These typically give you access to alert settings, so that you can just set it to search for unclaimed money and forget it.
If you don’t find something useful today, but you want to save your search, you can set a reminder or an alert that automatically repeats the search over time. And it notifies you when something of value is found in your name down the road. This is much easier than trying to remember all the details of your search parameters to repeat a query down the road.
These search engines also query all available databases across the nation, unlike searches you conduct personally. This speeds up the process tenfold. Whether money is found or not, quick search capabilities let you return to the things that matter most to you without having to spend hours or days flicking through obscure records in a hundred different databases.
Likewise, these search providers also tend to offer other search capabilities that come in particularly useful in home business growth or in routine personal searching use. Criminal records checks are a particularly handy addition to a home office’s arsenal of tools in order to provide guidance in hiring and mitigate potential liability through hiring negligence.
Seeking out unclaimed money is something that every American should be doing on a regular basis, considering the staggering amount of unclaimed capital there is floating around, waiting for its rightful owner to appear. Begin searching with a streamlined service and find those missing dollars, so you can put them to work for your savings or that next vacation.
