(Part 1 of 2)

In May of 2007, IL State Treasurer State Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias announced that the state's "Cash Dash" program currently holds nearly 1.4 Billion dollars in Illinois unclaimed money. The only thing standing between the cash and its true owners is the knowledge that it is out there and the ability to find it.

Sadly beyond just IL, state treasury departments across the nation continue to take in more unclaimed funds every year than they hand back to the people. Because everyone believes in the old "if it's too good to be true" saying, most people do not believe that there are truly tens of billions of dollars waiting to be claimed nationwide. Even for the handful who have come to accept the truth about unclaimed cash, the best way to track these monies down eludes them in most cases.

The Prairie is State is one of just a few states that holds over 1 billion dollars on its own, and that means that if you're a resident of IL then you have even better odds of locating a claim in your name, especially when you consider that the state has less than 13 million people and there are over 10 million names on the state's IL database.

Even though there are many more, IL names the following as the most common sources of forgotten funds: unpaid wages or commissions, abandoned savings and checking accounts, bonds, stock, un-cashed dividends, mutual funds, credit balances, customer deposits or overpayments, safe deposit box contents, money orders, refunds, paid-up life insurance policies, travelers checks. People who have had or know someone who might have had one of these types of accounts at one time or another is encouraged to search often.

(to be continued)

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