(Part 1 of 2)

In May 2007, Illinois State Treasurer State Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias announced that the state's "Cash Dash" program is holding almost $1.4 Billion in Illinois unclaimed money. The only thing standing between the cash and its true owners is the knowledge that it's out there waiting to be claimed and the ability to find it.

Sadly in addition to Illinois, state treasury departments across the nation keep on taking in more unclaimed money each year than they return to the citizens. Due to the fact that everyone believes in the old "if it's too good to be true" saying, the majority of people refuse to believe that there are truly tens of billions of dollars that can 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 more often than not.

The Prairie is State is one of those rare states that is holding over 1 billion dollars on its own, which means if you're a resident of Illinois then you have even greater odds of tracking down a claim in your name, especially after you consider that the state has just under 13 million people and there are more than 10 million names on the state's Illinois database.

Even though there are many more, Illinois 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. Anyone who has had or knows someone who might have had one of these types of accounts at some point in the past is encouraged to search regularly.

The Illinois State Treasury has returned over $432 million since it took over the unclaimed money program in 1999, $84 million of which was returned in 2006 alone, but with $1.4 Billion 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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