(Part 1 of 2)

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

Sadly in addition to IL, state treasury departments across the country keep on taking in more unclaimed funds annually than they return to the rightful owners. 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 across the country. Even for those few who have come to accept the truth about unclaimed assets, the best way to locate these monies eludes them most of the time.

The Prairie is State is one of just a few states that holds over a 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 factor in that the state has just under 13 million people and there are more than 10 million names on the state's IL database.

Although there are many more, IL lists the following as the most common sources of missing money: 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 accounts at some point in the past is encouraged to search frequently.

The IL State Treasury has handed back more than 432 million dollars since it took control of 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 mountain of cash will continue to grow.

(to be continued)

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