(Part 2 of 2)

The first rule of searching for unclaimed money is to search regularly. One of the biggest mistakes searchers generally make is to search only one time on the first website they see that has a search box and end their search there. This does not factor in that the vast majority of missing money web sites do not have accurate data, and even the official state listings are often slow to be updated. This is an issue, not only because someone in a state office has to physically add the record once it has been handed to the state, but because there are different time periods which must go by, unique to each kind of forgotten fund, before they are passed along to the state.

Some of the more common types of missing money are payroll, paid-up life insurance policies, money orders, commissions, deposits, death benefits, uncashed checks, insurance payments, dividends, stocks, dormant savings and checking accounts, mutual funds, bonds, wages, refunds, salary, and others. The majority of those have dormancy periods of 1 to 5 years, which means that if it has only been a year or two when a person searches; they would not see a record for an asset that has a dormancy period of three or more years.

In addition to needing to search the right websites often, a lot of people do not understand that they ought to search records outside of North Dakota. Believe it or not, a citizen could theoretically have not ever been outside of the state of North Dakota, but have assets owed to them in other states. this happens when assets from employers or insurance companies originate in other states. Quite often the actual corporate headquarters for for a company exists in a state separate from where a given employee works. Because of this, unclaimed properties being held by institutions in these situations will be handed over to the proper division of the company's home state's treasury department. Of course this means that North Dakota will not ever have any record of this cash, so a North Dakotan who hopes to find and claim it would need to use the same search strategies in other states.

These are just a few of the more common issues that hinder the searches of uninformed North Dakota citizens. But people can overcome these issues, and countless others, by spending just a little time studying up on the search strategies used by professional searchers before jumping in head first.

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