The State Of Virginia Is Waiting For Virginians To Step Up And Claim Their Missing Money

Category: Finance.

The state of Virginia is waiting for Virginians to step up and claim their missing money.

Over$ 27 million was returned to Virginians in 2005 alone, and that s just a small slice of what s available for claim. The state currently sits on top of a pile of Virginia unclaimed money totaling in the tens of millions of dollars. Virginia, like all other states, continually takes in more unclaimed cash than it returns, primarily because most people are simply unaware of these funds, and the few that are aware, don t know the correct way to locate them. According to the Unclaimed Property Div of the Virginia Dept. of the Treasury, Virginia unclaimed money arrives from a number of sources, which include( but are not limited to) : "savings and checking accounts, underlying shares, wages or commissions, dividends, credit balances, customer deposits, gift certificates, refunds, credit memos" . There is a right way and a wrong way to search, and sadly most people have not learned the proper way. A person doesn t have to currently live in Virginia to be owed unclaimed property, especially sense the majority of accounts must be dormant for 1 to 3 years before they are turned over to the state, and laws governing other types don t require that they be turned over for seven, even fifteen years, ten!

In addition to people who ve moved out of state, some people may not have ever lived in The state of Virginia. Moving out of state does not mean that you ve forfeited the money at all. For example, some folks are employed by companies that have their headquarters in Virginia. For these reasons( among others) , items like stocks, and refunds might, premium overpayments exist as unclaimed property in Virginia, even if the rightful owner has never even set foot in the state! Additionally, insurance companies are quite often based outside of the home state of the insured person. People who live in Virginia should also search the records of other states where there s a chance they are owed money, for the same reasons that people who don t live in Virginia should search the state s listings. Not only do most people hold themselves back by checking the records in only one state, usually their home state, but they also tend to search just once and call it quits.

There are a number of roadblocks that often prevent people from locating their missing money, but they mostly boil down to being uninformed about the correct way to search. As was mentioned earlier, each type of Virginia unclaimed property, and unclaimed property in all other states, have their own individual" dormancy periods" (number of years that must pass before the assets are turned over to the state to hold the rightful owner claims them) . If a resident searches their name on Monday, but the Virginia Dept. of Unclaimed Money doesn t get around to adding the record of their funds until Tuesday, or the next week or month, the search might return a false negative. In addition to some property types having longer dormancy periods, states don t update their searchable records in real time, which means if the state is holding your funds, you might not find a record when searching, if they have not added it to their online records. These are just a handful of the hurdles that often stand in the way of people attempting to locate Virginia unclaimed cash for the first time, which is why it s important that you find someone with experience in the unclaimed money field to help you through the process to track down all possible claims.