Northwood News ♦ April 2019

Singletary:  Five Places to Look for Unclaimed Money

By Jacquie Bokow

In her 2 September 2018 column “The Color of Money” in The Washington Post, fiscally conservative financial columnist Michelle Singletary listed five places readers of her column had identified (in an online discussion) where people can find unclaimed funds that belong to them.  You don’t need to pay someone to find lost property, you can do it yourself for free.  Here are her suggestions of where to look.  (Note that, for each of these, you’ll have to provide personal details — probably including your Social Security Number — in order to prove your own identity.)

• unclaimed.org.  Run by the National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators (NAUPA), a nonprofit affiliate of the National Association of State Treasurers.  Search the database for each State you or members of your family have ever lived.

• missingmoney.com.  Also sponsored by NAUPA.  You don’t have to search State-by-State; you just input your name and current State of residence.

• webapps.dol.gov/wow.  U.S. Labor Department’s “Workers Owed Wages” database for back wages from an old employer.  Hey, you never know!

• www.unclaimedretirementbenefits.com.  By the National Registry of Unclaimed Retirement Benefits, which is a subsidiary of PenChecks, a private company that provides retirement distribution services.  Just in case you’ve forgotten about an old 401(k) plan you contributed to years ago!  You’ll have to provide your Social Security Number.

• tinyurl.com/TrusteedPensionPlans.  The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation is a government agency that insures pensions that now may be the trustee of a failed pension plan.

Singletary prompts us to “go look for your money,” but she cautions us to be careful of missing money scams.  “Don’t pay someone to do a search you can do for free,” she admonishes. “The point is to find cash, not give it away.”   ■