If you’ve misplaced some money — perhaps forgot about a small bank account when you moved, or lost track of a few shares of stock — there’s now an easy and free way to look for it, thanks to a fledgling commercial Web site that helps people with their lost assets.
Aptly named Missing Money, the site could provide a windfall for the roughly one in eight Americans who have money coming to them that they are unaware of.
Just ask Lydia Dominguez, a New Mexico retiree. Her daughter, Mary Lou Lujan, found $1,000 her mother had coming from a matured life insurance policy that Lydia purchased before Mary Lou was born. Dominguez had forgotten about it.
Joseph Wilson, a Long Beach, Calif., insurance agent, had a similar experience. Surfing the Internet one night, he ran across the Missing Money site. Minutes later, he’d found $384 that hadn’t kept up with his multiple cross-country moves. A second search netted information about 32 shares in Ford Motor Co. that he lost track of when he left college more than two decades ago.
Missing Money is the product of a public-private partnership between the National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators, a group of state officials charged with collecting and holding abandoned property owned by residents of their respective states, and CheckFree, a provider of electronic bill paying services and software.
The partners struck a deal two years ago to create a Web site that will eventually allow free one-stop searching for lost property nationwide.
The site (www.missingmoney.com) was launched in November, but its vision is only half-realized.
So far, just 27 states and the District of Columbia are participating.
But even if your state is one of the holdouts — California and Illinois, for instance, have not joined — you can use the site to link to other state-controlled missing property databases.
If your lost property happens to be in the District of Columbia or in one of the 27 states that participate in Missing Money (see below for which states and what types of property are included), all you need to do is type in one search request.
The site electronically seeks data on your property from the missing-owner records provided by those states.
If your property is found, the site provides the appropriate form to claim the money, which often can be done electronically.
Getting a check can take several weeks to several months, depending on where the property is. (Big states with lots of unclaimed property take longer.)
Missing Money’s search and property claim process is free.
Other property-search Web sites operated by so-called tracer and heir finder services charge between $14 and $40 to help you seek or claim your dough.
Typically, these fees cover just one or two searches or claims.
So anyone who left money in several states, as Wilson did, might end up paying several search fees.
There are also some property search services that charge a fee based on a percentage of what you find.
The Missing Money site makes its money through advertising.
CheckFree also benefits when people register as members and agree to have marketing information sent to them.
However, they do not gather information on casual visitors to the site who don’t register as members.
“The only problem we ever have (with Missing Money) is that people don’t believe that it’s free, so they call us to check,” says Vicki Bridgeman, director of unclaimed property for Virginia, which has participated in Missing Money since the service was launched. “It takes awhile to get the word out.”
What happens if you think you left property in a state that isn’t connected to Missing Money?
The site offers a link to every electronic missing-property database, regardless of whether the state officially participates in the service or not.
The search process is simply a touch less convenient.
For instance, because Illinois has not yet signed up with Missing Money, an Illinois resident might want to conduct two searches — one on the site’s main page, which links to the 28 participating subscribers, and a second that requires the searcher to flip to a map of the U.S. and click on Illinois.
That brings up Illinois’ unclaimed-property database on the the page.
The searcher then is prompted until he or she gets to the Owners page. He or she then types in his or her last name, then clicks the search key again to see if any property is sitting in the Illinois state treasury.
If you believe you lost property in a state that doesn’t have a Web site, Missing Money’s state-by-state link will provide the address of that state’s unclaimed property office.
The result of this fairly painless searching process has been dramatic, says Mike Meriton, senior vice president with CheckFree.
In the last 10 months, 3 million users have logged on and conducted about 13 million searches.
Those searches have resulted in 275,000 successful claims, averaging $250 each.
Because the site is getting increasing attention, the pace of searching and staking claims is ramping up, he adds.
Right now, the site logs about 900 successful claims each day.
Here are answers to some frequently asked questions about the Missing Money Web site:
Q.–What type of property is in this database?
A.–It runs the gamut from forgotten phone and rental deposits to contents of safe deposit boxes, bank accounts and securities.
The only types of property that are generally not included are funds owed to you by federal authorities, which typically operate their own services.
Q–How does property get lost?
A–Property often gets lost because of illness or upheaval.
For instance, my grandmother had a stroke several years before she died, making it impossible for her to communicate.
A product of the Great Depression, she had opened small bank accounts all over Southern California.
They ended up “dormant” — which generally happens when no business is transacted for three years or more — and getting escheated, or turned over, to the state.
Other people say they lost track of bank accounts when they divorced, moved, lost a spouse or experienced another traumatic event.
Some say they didn’t lose the bank account, but the bank apparently lost track of them when there was a corporate merger or, in some cases, a series of mergers.
Q–Which states participate in the Missing Money database?
A–Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia and Wisconsin, as well as the District of Columbia.
Q–Are there other unclaimed property databases on the Web?
A–Lots of them. Information can be found at the National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators site at naupa.org.
Other general property search sites are at unclaimedassets.com and www.kantrowitz.com.
There also are heir-finder sites that will charge you a fee to claim, or even search for, your assets at www.foundmoney.com ($20); www.fundsrecovery.com ($39) and www.moneysearch.org ($14).
Q–Is there any good reason to pay a fee to search for my lost property?
A–No.
