Finance Wanted.

By Russ D Johnson

Utah may be known as the Beehive State, but the UT State Treasurer's Office is holding a treasure that's sweeter than any honey. Each year millions of dollars in abandoned assets are turned over to the state treasury department in the form of Utah unclaimed money. As of 2005, the state treasury was holding more than $100 million dollars, waiting for the rightful owners to step forward and take back what is owed to them.

Though it's tough for most people to believe that this money is real, because it's almost inconceivable that people could simple "forget" about such large sums of money, but in fact unclaimed property comes from accounts and assets most of us have and use on a regular basis. Though there are dozens of different types, the UT State Treasurer's website lists the following as the most common sources of lost money: "checking accounts, certificates of deposit, overpayments, gift certificates, paid-up life insurance policies, unpaid wages, commissions, uncashed checks, death benefits, dividends, insurance payments, money orders, refunds, savings accounts, stocks and contents of safe deposit boxes".

While locating missing many can be easy for those that 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 obstacles amount to being uneducated about how to perform thorough searches to ensure all possible claims have been discovered. When starting out, it's often easy to fall in to the trap of just searching one time and accepting the 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're aware of the reality of unclaimed funds, is that there are actually very few sites that offer the official state records. For starters, most of these sites are unreliable to the point that a person would be completely wasting their time to get involved with them. But even the official state records are often incomplete for a variety of reasons. For one, each type of asset has its own dormancy period, or period of time that must pass before law requires a holder to turn the asset over to the state. Even after assets are turned over to the state, someone has to physically add the record to Utah's unclaimed money listings. For this reason, search results showing no claims might be misleading if the record just hasn't been turned over or the state hasn't added it to their system.

Despite these issues, and many others that plague beginners, people can learn the search methods of professional searches and implement them in their own searches. Far too often, citizens jump in to the unclaimed asset game without knowing where to begin and they spoil their own potential for finding lost treasure. If everyone would spend just a little time educating themselves on where to search, and how often they should search, everyone would stand a better chance of taking back money that is rightfully theirs, instead of letting it collect dust in some government office.

Unclaimed money and property expert Russ Johnson has been assisting Americans in finding their unclaimed money online since 1997. His site, http://www.unclaimedmoney.net, is updated regularly and offers guaranteed official searches for Utah unclaimed money and missing money across the country.