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Today's Money Win
Type Your Name, Get Your Money
Your state is sitting on cash with your name on it, and the search takes ninety seconds.
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Your state may be holding your money.
And you can find out tonight, from the couch, in about ninety seconds. It costs nothing to look.
Right now, the fifty states are sitting on roughly $70 billion that belongs to regular people. Not lottery winnings. A last paycheck from a job you walked away from. The utility deposit on an apartment you moved out of in 2014. Forty-three dollars left in a checking account at a bank that got swallowed by a bigger bank.
About 33 million Americans have money waiting in one of those accounts. Roughly one in ten people reading this line.
You never got the letter because the letter went to an address you left in 2016.
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$70 Billion, 33 Million Names
Held by U.S. states, waiting for someone to claim it (NAUPA)
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A company that owes you cash and can’t reach you — wrong address, dead phone number, no reply — is required by law to hand it to your state after a few years. Your old landlord does it. So does the payroll company, the insurance company, the bank.
Then the state holds it. In most states it never expires and nobody gets to spend it. The money just sits in an account with your name attached, waiting for you to type that name into a box.
What shows up on these lists is stranger than you’d guess. Refund checks that were mailed and never cashed. A few shares of stock from a job that gave them out in 2009. Insurance payouts on a policy somebody canceled and forgot. Even the contents of a safe deposit box nobody paid the rent on.
Nobody calls to tell you. The state treasurer runs no ads and mails no reminders. You have to go look.
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→ The 5 PM Fix
Go to unclaimed.org and click Search. Pick your state from the map — it hands you off to your state treasurer’s official page. Type your last name, then your first. Hit search.
Then run every state you’ve ever lived in. Try your maiden name. Search your spouse, your parents, your grown kids.
Searching is free on the official state sites — you don’t make an account, enter a card, or hand a cut to a finder company. If a page asks for money just to look, close the tab. Ninety seconds, start to finish.
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Plenty of people search and find nothing, and that’s ninety seconds well spent either way. But say your name comes up next to $187 from a deposit you made in 2011. Filling the claim takes a short form and a photo of your ID. A check lands in your mailbox a few weeks later, for money you already earned and stopped counting on. Most hits land somewhere between $50 and a few hundred dollars — not a windfall, but a dinner out and a full tank of gas you weren’t expecting.
Nothing else on your to-do list pays like that per minute.
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Ninety seconds. Zero dollars. A real shot your name is on the list.
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Search your own name tonight, then text the link to your mom. Parents have moved more times and left more accounts behind, and they hit more often than anyone.
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Make today a little better.
— Steph
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