Unclaimed money
There is money sitting with the state, waiting for somebody to ask for it
Every state in America keeps a list of money it is holding for people who never came to collect it. Old bank accounts. Insurance payouts that were never cashed. Final paychecks, deposits left with the gas company, the contents of safe deposit boxes nobody opened.
The list is public. Searching it is free and takes about a minute.
Most of that money is sitting there for the same dull reason. The family never knew the account was there.
This is a United States system. Other countries handle it differently or hardly at all, so what follows applies if the accounts you’re looking for are American.
How money ends up with the state
When an account goes quiet for long enough, the bank has to hand it over to the state. How long depends on where you are, but a few years is common.
The state doesn’t spend it. It holds the money, publishes the name of whoever it belongs to, and waits for that person or their family to come and ask. There’s no fee and no time limit on claiming.
There’s nothing sinister in any of this. The state is running a lost property office for money.
The safe deposit box
Boxes go the same way, and almost nobody knows the details.
In Pennsylvania, to take one state that publishes its rules plainly, a box counts as abandoned once the rent has gone unpaid for three years. The bank then opens it, writes down what’s inside, and sends the contents to the state Treasury. The Treasury holds them for another three years and advertises for the owner, by letter and in newspapers.
After that the contents can be sold at auction. If they are, the person who eventually claims gets every penny of what they fetched, and the state holds that money indefinitely, so a claim made twenty years later is still a claim.
Military medals are treated separately and aren’t sold. Pennsylvania keeps a search of its own just for them.
In most of these cases the family never knew there was a box.
What the search will and won’t tell you
It works. Put in a surname and a state and it will show you what’s being held. If your mother’s name is on it there’s a form, and the form is free. Be wary of anybody who offers to do this for a percentage, because you can do it yourself in a minute.
It can’t find anything that hasn’t been handed over yet, and that takes years. A perfectly live account at a bank nobody in the family has heard of won’t appear. Neither will a policy that’s still being paid, with a company nobody remembers.
The gap nothing closes
Any bank will tell you whether an account exists, once you tell them which bank to look in. An insurance company will confirm a policy once you name the insurance company.
Not one of them can tell you which company to ask about in the first place.
That’s why these lists get as long as they do. Only one person ever knew which bank, and by the time anybody needs to know, that person can’t be asked.
If you’re dealing with a death right now, search your state’s list before you do anything else. It’s free, it takes a minute, and it’s the one part of this that somebody else has already done for you.
Sources
- Unclaimed property search, National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators
- Tangible property and safe deposit boxes, Pennsylvania Treasury
- What happened to my lost safe deposit box contents? Office of the Comptroller of the Currency
Which bank, which insurer, where the box is. All of it answerable now, by the one person who knows. Here is a finished binder, free to read: the example binder.