Utah’s unclaimed money grows to more than $100 million
Utah may be known as the Beehive State, but the UT State Treasurer’s Office has a treasure that’s sweeter than any honey. Every year, millions of dollars in stranded assets are turned over to the state treasury department in the form of unclaimed Utah money. As of 2005, the state treasury held more than $100 million dollars, waiting for the rightful owners to step forward and recover what they are owed.
Although it is difficult for most people to believe that this money is real, because it is almost inconceivable that people could simply “forget” such large sums of money, but in fact, the unclaimed property comes from accounts and assets that the most of us have and use on a regular basis. Although there are dozens of different types, the UT State Treasurer’s website lists the following as the most common sources of money loss: “checking accounts, certificates of deposit, overpayments, gift certificates, paid life insurance policies, unpaid wages, commissions, uncashed checks, death benefits, dividends, insurance payments, money orders, refunds, savings accounts, stocks and contents of security deposit boxes”.
While locating lost lots can be easy for those who know what they’re doing, there are dozens of obstacles that can and often do get in the way of people trying to find their cash. Most of these hurdles amount to a lack of education on how to conduct thorough searches to ensure all possible claims have been discovered. When starting out, it’s often easy to fall into the trap of searching just once and accepting search results as the beginning and end of a search. The next biggest mistake is believing that all search sites are the same.
What most people don’t realize, even once they are aware of the reality of unclaimed funds, is that there are actually very few sites that offer official state records. To begin with, most of these sites are unreliable to the point where a person would be completely wasting their time to get involved with them. But even official state records are often incomplete for a variety of reasons. For one thing, each type of asset has its own dormant period, or period of time that must pass before the law requires the owner to turn over the asset to the state. Even after the assets are turned over to the state, someone has to physically add the record to Utah’s unclaimed money lists. For this reason, search results showing no claims can be misleading if the record simply wasn’t turned in or the state didn’t add it to their system.
Despite these problems, and many others that plague beginners, people can still learn the search methods of professional searches and implement them in their own searches. Too often, citizens jump into the unclaimed asset game without knowing where to start and spoil their own potential to find lost treasures. If everyone would spend a little time educating themselves on where to look and how often to look, everyone would have a better chance of getting back the money that is rightfully theirs, rather than letting it gather dust in some government office.