(Part 1 of 2)

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

Sadly beyond just IL, state treasury departments across the United States keep on taking in more unclaimed funds every year than they return to the citizens. Because everyone believes in the old "if it's too good to be true" saying, most people refuse to believe that there are truly tens of billions of dollars waiting to be claimed nationwide. Even for the handful who have realized the truth about unclaimed assets, the best way to find these monies eludes them more often than not.

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

Although there are quite a few more, IL lists the following as the most common sources of missing money: abandoned savings and checking accounts, unpaid wages or commissions, stock, bonds, mutual funds, un-cashed dividends, customer deposits or overpayments, credit balances, refunds, money orders, travelers checks, paid-up life insurance policies, safe deposit box contents. People who have had or know someone who may have had one of these types of accounts at some point in the past is encouraged to search frequently.

The IL State Treasury has returned more than 432 million dollars since it took over the unclaimed funds program in 1999, $84 million of which was given back in 2006 alone, but with 1.4 Billion dollars waiting to be claimed and more coming in all the time, the heap of cash will continue to grow.

(to be continued)

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