Free money

By the time you read this, I could be $4.11 richer.

All I did was visit unclaimed.org, the official website of the National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators (NAUPA), entered a little information about myself, and discovered that the State of Missouri was holding some unclaimed property in my name.

Missouri’s state treasurer, in fact, is currently holding more than $1 billion in unclaimed assets. According to its website, one in 10 Missourians has unclaimed property with the average claim being around $300. In Illinois, the state treasurer is sitting on $3.5 billion.

I titled this blog post “Free Money”, but that was actually just to get your attention. It’s not free money at all. It’s your money and if you have a few minutes, it could be worth your time to go find it.

It could even change your life. You might have read the tragic story of Cathy Boone, a woman in Astoria, Oregon, who died in a homeless shelter in 2020. She had been battling drug abuse and mental illness, and the $884,407 of her money being held in Oregon’s unclaimed property program might have helped. She had inherited the money when her mother died several years earlier, and the family was never able to find her.

Many, many years ago, when I hosted a news segment on KMOV-TV called “News 4 Your Money”, I used to go knocking on doors trying to track down people in the St. Louis area who had unclaimed property waiting for them. We recovered thousands of missing dollars, made a lot of people very happy, and scored a ratings coup that the other stations were quick to copy.

Times have changed a lot since then. I don’t knock on strangers’ doors anymore, and the computer printout I got from the Missouri treasurer has been replaced with a slick website that allows anyone to search for unclaimed property in a matter of seconds. All 50 states now have such websites, along with the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. You can search any state where you might have property, and you can even search several states at once through MissingMoney.com.

I have no idea where my missing money came from, but you can bet I’m going to find out. It could be interest from an old bank account, contents of an abandoned safe deposit box, an uncashed check, utility deposit, or part of an inheritance I didn’t know about. The money gets turned over to the states when financial institutions and other entities aren’t able to locate its true owner.

If you think there might be money or property that belongs to you – or even if you’re just curious – do an online search to find out. But be careful when dealing with third-party asset locators: they take a cut of whatever they recover, and according to NAUPA some of them are outright scams.

Hey, you don’t suppose that $4.11 was my well-deserved year-end bonus from Channel 4, do you?

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