(Part 1 of 2)

In May of 2007, IL State Treasurer State Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias stated that the state's "Cash Dash" abandoned asset program is holding roughly $1.4 Billion in Illinois unclaimed money. The only thing standing between the cash and its rightful owners is the knowledge that it is out there and the ability to find it.

Sadly beyond just IL, state treasury departments across the country continue to take in more unclaimed money each year than they hand back to the people. Due to the fact that everyone believes in the old "if it's too good to be true" saying, most people do not believe that there are really tens of billions of dollars waiting to be claimed across the country. Even for those few who have learned the truth about unclaimed properties, the best way to track these monies down eludes them most of the time.

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

Even though there are many more, IL lists the following as the most common types 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.

The IL State Treasury has returned over 432 million dollars since it took control of the unclaimed money program in 1999, 84 million dollars of which was returned in 2006 alone, but with $1.4 Billion waiting to be claimed and more coming in all the time, the pile of cash will keep on growing.

(to be continued)

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