(Part 1 of 2)

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

Sadly beyond just IL, state treasury departments across the nation keep on taking in more unclaimed money annually than they hand back 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 really tens of billions of dollars waiting to be claimed nationwide. Even for the handful who have come to accept the truth about unclaimed properties, 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 are 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 less than 13 million people and there are over 10 million names on the state's IL database.

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

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

(to be continued)

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