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| The Basics | Unclaimed billions: How much is yours?
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A treasure awaits, and it's growing faster than ever. Here's how to find out how much of it belongs to you.
By Liz Pulliam Weston
If money is tight, you may long for a little windfall to ease your burden.
You may think that's an idle wish, but in fact there are billions of dollars' worth of windfalls out there waiting for someone to claim them. Just look at this partial list of unclaimed cash:- Some big insurance companies -- including Prudential, MetLife and John Hancock -- are looking for customers owed more than $4 billion from a spate of corporate organization changes.
- The IRS has more than $6 billion of unclaimed refunds, largely from people who paid taxes and then failed to file a return.
- The U.S. Treasury says more than $9 billion in savings bonds has reached "final maturity," which means the bonds are no longer earning interest.
- Some $23 billion waits in states' unclaimed property offices, representing everything from utility deposits and never-cashed paychecks to the contents of safe deposit boxes.
The accumulation picked up since 2002, when the Sarbanes-Oxley Act began requiring fundamental changes in how corporate and financial activities are governed and reported. The $22.8 billion states collected in 2003, the most recent year for which numbers are available, is 44% more than the $15.8 billion collected in 2000, according to surveys by the Lexington, Ky.-based National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators.
How to dig for gold
Some for-profit companies may offer to help you "find" some of this money for a fee, ranging from a flat $10 to 20% of what you're owed. But you typically don't need to pay anyone to track down your cash -- you just need a little know-how.
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Here are some major categories of unclaimed funds, and the best approaches to take:
Insurance companies. A few years ago, "demutualization" was all the rage in the insurance industry. Companies that had been owned by their policyholders converted to stock ownership. The policyholders were supposed to get shares in the converted companies, but the insurers weren't always able to track down these customers.
MetLife, which demutualized in 2000, couldn't find the owners of some 60 million shares -- about 12% of the 493.5 million shares allocated to policyholders. At current stock prices, those shares are worth about $2.7 billion. Prudential, which demutualized the next year, couldn't find a million policyholders -- about 10% of the total -- who are owed about $845 million. John Hancock couldn't find owners of some 400,000 shares.
If you owned a policy from these insurers, or one of the nearly two dozen other companies that demutualized in the past decade, you may be owed shares or cash. You also may be in luck if you're the heir of someone who had a policy with these companies and has since died.
Fee-only insurance consultant Glenn Daily keeps a list of insurance companies that have demutualized here. You can contact the companies directly and ask if you're owed money; typically you'll be referred to the insurers' transfer agents, the firms that actually handle share transactions.
"People can call up and say, 'I think my mother was a policyholder,'" says Prudential spokeswoman Mary Flowers. "They'll be asked a bunch of questions and we'll check to see who owned the policy and who the beneficiaries are."
You may be referred to a state unclaimed property office. Typically, after three to five years unclaimed property and cash are "escheated," or turned over to the state in which the policyholder had a last known address. (If the shares haven't already been turned into cash, the escheat office usually sells them and holds the money in trust until owners can be found.)
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MSN Money's editorial goal is to provide a forum for personal finance and investment ideas. Our articles, columns, message board posts and other features should not be construed as investment advice, nor does their appearance imply an endorsement by Microsoft of any specific security or trading strategy. An investor's best course of action must be based on individual circumstances.
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