Quezi

Is there unclaimed money or property waiting for you somewhere? (photo: Flickr Commons nckr)

Believe it our not, people abandon their valuables all the time, to the tune of billions of dollars of unclaimed assets sitting in accounts around the world.

Perhaps someone moves away from home and forgets about their local bank account or safe deposit box. Or a property passes on to an heir who cannot be located. I actually had a smallish pension fund from an old job sitting around, unclaimed, that I didn’t know existed until I checked some online sources.

You can search for unclaimed assets around the world, money or property that may belong to you, or that could possibly belong to you as an inheritance if the original owner has passed on.

In the U.S., start your search at MissingMoney, a consolidated lookup service for state unclaimed assets accounts. Check the Pension Benefits Guaranty Corporation for — you guessed it — unclaimed pension accounts.  Up north, you can check for Canadian unclaimed funds in Alberta, British Columbia and Quebec.

Of course, losing track of your money and property isn’t just a North American phenomenon. You can also search for unclaimed assets in the UK (and here too), Australia and a number of other countries around the world.

Don’t  forget to search on the names of friends and relatives as well as on your own name…they’ll love you forever (even more than they already do!) if you find some missing money for them.

I wish you good luck in your searching. And you’ll be happy to know I only ask a ten percent finders fee ;-)

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