While so much of life is suckage these days, it's nice to get a pleasant financial surprise out of the blue.
My daughter got a letter from a former car insurance company, saying they are owed money, which is awesome. She has no idea why the money ended up as unclaimed funds with the State of Florida, but she's taken the steps to claim the money, so yay! She told me about it and told me that my name was also on the site, and so was her father's. I've linked here to the Florida Department of Financial Services to prove this is legit, because seriously, who on earth came up with the name of the site: FLTreasureHunt.gov.
Doesn't that sound like a game show, or some sort of scam? But it's real. Your state probably has something similar, hopefully with a more professional sounding name. Try Googling "[your state] unclaimed funds" and see what happens. Because I found over $450 that has been just sitting out there, waiting to be claimed. $30 of it is mine, a refund of overpaid highway tolls; $300 is my late husband's, a credit balance on a credit card, and another $125-ish is some sort of extra money owed to my parents when they sold stock they'd owned for decades. I had NO idea any of this existed until my daughter got the letter about the car insurance refund.
Of course there are hurdles to claim the money; and this is why I say Marie Kondo can suck it, because although there was no reason to hold onto multiple copies of death certificates, wills, etc. for the past decade, I happen to have a handy file folder with copies of all of those things, and yes, I have to produce them to claim the funds. I've assembled the information they requested, and I'll probably still get questions because neither my father nor my late husband had any court filings after their deaths; they had plenty of time to transfer their assets, such as they were, into joint accounts with my mother and me. My mother did have a very small probate case, just so I could get legal permission to sell their home. So it's all been done and settled for years, and there was no reason I couldn't have shredded the extra copies of everything, but I never got around to it because you just never know what might come up. Like hundreds of dollars held by the state in a program that sounds like a game show. Yes, I could have recreated the necessary documents, but not without a lot of phone calls to various offices and shelling out some cash for certified copies, etc.
So yeah, while holding onto a folder of paperwork about dead relatives most definitely has never even remotely "brought me joy," it turned out to be a very good thing indeed. Pack-rattery for the win!
2 comments:
ALL states have unclaimed funds websites and you do not need to go through a third party to reclaim your money. My husband used to work for the escheat department of Wells Fargo Bank a million years ago, which basically means that a whole slew of people would contact bank customers to verify they were the account holders before their money was turned over to the state. To be clear an account has to basically have no activity for 5-7 years before it's turned over to the state. I have unclaimed funds being held by our state but it's for so little money that it's not worth the hassle of reclaiming it. Fun fact contents of unclaimed safety deposit boxes are also turned over to the state and the contents are auctioned off every year as well. So if you have a safety deposit box make sure you visit it once in a while and make sure your contact information is up to date.
I know these unclaimed funds websites exist; I was just amused that FL gave theirs a name that sounds like it was created by a Nigerian prince. :-)
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