Billions of dollars are just waiting to be claimed by people all across the country just like you. Sounds too good to be true doesn’t it? Well the fact is that it is true. Billions of dollars are being held by the individual states in their “unclaimed money” departments just waiting for the rightful owners to claim the money—and you could be the rightful owner!

Money held as unclaimed money can come from many sources; however, one common source is life insurance proceeds. When a policy holder dies, the life insurance company that underwrote the policy is required to pay out the policy proceeds to the named beneficiaries in the policy. That is, of course, assuming that they know the policy holder died and that they can locate the beneficiaries. Often, the term on a policy expires and the company cannot locate the policy holder, meaning they do not know if he or she is dead or alive. More often, a company receives notification that the policy holder died, but they cannot locate one or more beneficiaries. When this occurs, they are required to send the money to the state for safekeeping until the rightful owner claims the funds.

To find out if you are due any unclaimed money, you must check each individual state. Although there are companies that will do it for you, you can usually take a few hours and search the internet yourself to determine what office in each potential state handles their unclaimed money and how to search their records. You never know, you could be rich and not even know it!