How I Made $15,000 From Unclaimed Funds and Why I Will Not Do It Again

I have always been fascinated by unclaimed funds. The hype
that you read is TRUE there are literally billions of dollars in
unclaimed funds just waiting to be claimed and all a finder has
to do is get in the middle!
(well not exactly some states go to great lengths to prohibit finders fees)
So about 17 years ago I was really into this and I would check
out all I could find on the internet. I began finding info about
people with unclaimed money in New Jersey some of it large
amounts. Eventually, I found out that each year at a courthouse in
New Jersey they post a list of unclaimed Funds from lawsuits.
People will file a lawsuit. The case drags on for 10 years, if they
moved to another address and they won the case the court might
be unable to find them and the funds go unclaimed.
So each year, if I remember correctly July 29, they post the list of
funds and you have untill sept to claim the money before it goes to
the State Unclaimed Property office which can take years to get
your money back from.
Anyway, I went down to the courthouse and found the list. It was
many pages and you can’t make copies only notes!!!
Now here is where luck or providence or whatever steps in. In
those days I was more on the formal side and had a white shirt
and tie on. (nowadays I would not wear that unless you paid me)
One of the ladies in the office saw me and said “You must be from
the State, I will make copies for you”
Wow! She thought I was from the state Government, she copied
the whole thing for me!!! Haa!

So I took the list home but now my work had just begun.
The list showed a number of lawsuits like D.O.T. VS. Lejman,
Stanley, $6878.71 and a docket Number and county. But did not
show who won the case or addresses!
The list I had was 26 pages with at least 500 cases. Many amounts
were under $5,000 but there were plenty of big money cases too.
Some over $200,000. To get the needed info addresses, etc I had
to go to Trenton and check the court records on microfilm.
This took a few days. I found info on ten cases that looked good
and sent out registered letters yo the people that had unclaimed
funds. I had set up a so called finder company and the letter basicly
Said they had unclaimed funds and I would help them recover for
20% Commission. I sent the letter by registered mail which cost
about $12 each, But I had to convince them this was Real and not
a scam.
Out of the 10 letters I sent, I got one reply! The lady had won
$50,000 In an insurance case but she did not know because she had
moved to Atlanta. She wanted my help, she was not aware that the
money was from the lawsuit she had started 8 years ago until I told
her.

To make a long story short. I filed a claim on her behalf. But it was
now past the September Deadline. The money has gone to the State
unclaimed property office.

It took 3 years to recover that money! Dorothy got her 50 K
(actually $49,328.53) and she sent me a check for 20% almost
10 thousand!

The next year I decided to do the same thing. I had doubts because
I had done a lot of research and sent out 10 letters costing 12 bucks
each and only got one reply and I did not have the money from that yet.
But I decided to do it again.

The results this time after sending out around 9 letters
I got only one reply that accepted my offer. I called one guy on my
list and he said he knew about The money but did not want his lawyer
to get it!!! The lady who accepted my offer was overjoyed to find out
about the money and I got the claim made while the court still had the
Funds. I ended up with a check for over $5,000!

So why won’t I do this again? Well, it was a lot of work and some
expenditure with no guarantee I would get anything. Only one case out
of 10! Furthermore, when I went to the courthouse to Research, I saw
others doing the same thing. The lady who sent me the 5k check said
after I Contacted her somone else had called but she was loyal to me
because I was first. That shows how close it was. With the competition
increasing, and this opportunity coming only once a year, I figured real
estate or other areas might be better to look into.
Now that so many records are online, it might be worth taking a look
at again. But I am focusing on other things right now.

[GordonJ]

Great post, thank you for sharing. Early in to a new "thing" works, or as they say, early birds get the worms. We appreciate our reader's experiences.

Gordon

Thanks, Gordon. That was the biggest deal I ever made and a fair while ago.
But the money is certainly out the there. In the stock market alone there are millions refunded each day because of trading errors and a lot of that goes unclaimed. Errors on mortgages, unclaimed bank accounts, unclaimed pension and inusurance policies and treasury bonds. It's mindboggling. A guy went
on Oprah and found unclaimed money for almost every person he tested.
someone at my workplace was interested and I located about 10k in unclaimed funds he he had coming. I located a few hundred for my Mom also.
It's estimated about 3 out of 5 Americans have unclaimed money.

[Dien Rice]

Originally Posted by teamplayer

But the money is certainly out the there. In the stock market alone there are millions refunded each day because of trading errors and a lot of that goes unclaimed. Errors on mortgages, unclaimed bank accounts, unclaimed pension and inusurance policies and treasury bonds. It's mindboggling. A guy went
on Oprah and found unclaimed money for almost every person he tested.
someone at my workplace was interested and I located about 10k in unclaimed funds he he had coming. I located a few hundred for my Mom also.
It's estimated about 3 out of 5 Americans have unclaimed money.

Thanks teamplayer for sharing your story!

I never really knew that much about unclaimed funds, however, it's something I've always been interested in. I've read a little bit about it here and there, but that's about it. I certainly didn't think about the pitfalls, and the time that can be involved too!

The story of your experiences are certainly illuminating! And fascinating too!

Thanks again for sharing.

You know, this is something that many people would love to learn more about. If you wanted to, this is something you could probably create a report about, or an audio recording, or a video course, and you could make some money from your experiences...

Best wishes,

Dien

Originally Posted by Dien Rice

Thanks teamplayer for sharing your story!

I never really knew that much about unclaimed funds, however, it's something I've always been interested in. I've read a little bit about it here and there, but that's about it. I certainly didn't think about the pitfalls, and the time that can be involved too!

The story of your experiences are certainly illuminating! And fascinating too!

Thanks again for sharing.

You know, this is something that many people would love to learn more about. If you wanted to, this is something you could probably create a report about, or an audio recording, or a video course, and you could make some money from your experiences...

Best wishes,

Dien

Hi Diem, you are right there are many pitfalls in this field. For example some
states like Texas make it very difficult to get finders fees on State Unclaimed property,
but that's only one type of unclaimed account. It would not affect
items not in the state unclaimed property office. Basically you want to after
money you can get quickly. Money held by a court, for example can usually
be gotten in a week or two, but money held by the state unclaimed property office
can take years. I mentioned the guy who went on Oprah and found unclaimed money
for many people in the audience, (some of it in the thousands!) I got his book
"Assets Unknown" His name is David Folsom.
It is a little outdated but has extremely valuable info on this subject.
I think the biggest problem in the field would be deciding where to start!
Go after the millions in unclaimed stocks? Or bank accounts unclaimed.
Heirs to unclaimed inheritances? Another area which is huge is real estate.
A property is seized by the state for unpaid taxes and sold at auction.
Any money that the state gets beyond the tax owed has to go the original
owner who lost the property. as you can imagine a huge number of these owners
have no idea they have this money coming to them. We are talking many
thousands of people and thousands of dollars.

I just love this. It's from the New York Times so it must be true!

This wise guy Kotlikoff goes up to a couple and tells them they have an extra $100,000 in social security they did not know about. Then he tells a guy
who is actually a retirement expert, that he has $50,000 extra coming. WHAT!
These are all smart people and they missed this stuff. Just think how much the average person might be missing in benefits.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/14/yo...rity.html?_r=0

In recent years, the Boston University economist Laurence J. Kotlikoff has made something of a game — and then, eventually, an art — of cornering smart people and convincing them that they were leaving tens of thousands of Social Security dollars on the table.
He did it with Glenn Loury, an M.I.T.-trained, Brown University economics professor whose wife, Linda, had recently died of cancer. His spouse was a prominent economics professor herself, but neither of them realized that her survivor’s benefits would be worth more than $100,000 to Mr. Loury until Mr. Kotlikoff told him.
Philip Moeller, a writer and retirement expert, also had it wrong, though he almost didn’t find out as he stubbornly insisted to Mr. Kotlikoff that he and his wife knew what they were doing. They did not; Mr. Kotlikoff landed them nearly $50,000 extra with some fancy footwork related to spousal benefits
The pair eventually teamed with a third author, the “PBS NewsHour” correspondent Paul Solman, to write the guide to Social Security “Get What’s Yours,” which came out last month. The overwhelming demand took the publisher by surprise. The book raced to the No. 1 slot sitewide on Amazon, whose inventory of paper books was wiped out for weeks.
But we should not be surprised by this. Social Security is the biggest source of retirementincome for many Americans, and even if you’ve made more money than average during your career, that just means that the book’s tricks and tips will be ever more relevant. After all, the more you’ve made, the more you have at stake when it comes to filing for benefits in just the right way at precisely the right moment.
Given that there are 2,728 core rules and thousands more supplements to them according to the authors, it pays, literally, to seek out a guide. The book covers filing and suspending, “deeming” rulesthat are too complicated to explain here, the family maximum benefit and other head-scratchers that can nonetheless move the financial needle in a significant way.
The book’s success is also, however, symptomatic of something that we take for granted but should actually disgust us: The complexity of our financial lives is so extreme that we must painstakingly manage each and every aspect of it, from government programs to investing to loyalty programs. Mr. Kotlikoff’s game has yielded large winnings for his friends and readers (and several dinners of gratitude), but the fact that gamesmanship is even necessary in the first place with our national safety net is shameful.
Mr. Kotlikoff, 64, did not set out to become Dr. Social Security. Two decades ago, he and a colleague were studying the adequacy of life insurance. To do so, you need to know something about Social Security. Soon, Mr. Kotlikoff was developing a computer model for various payouts from the government program and realized that consumers might actually pay to use it.
From that instinct, a service called Maximize My Social Security was born, though it wasn’t easy to do and get it right. “We had to develop very detailed code, and the whole Social Security rule book is written in geek,” he said. “It’s impossible to understand.”
Continue reading the main story
Because of that, most people filing for benefits have to get lucky enough to encounter a true expert in their social circle, at a Social Security office or on its hotline. They are rare, and this information dissymmetry offends Mr. Kotlikoff. “We have a system that produces inequality systematically,” he said. It’s not because of what the beneficiaries earned, either; it’s simply based on their (perhaps random) access to those who have a deep understanding of the rules

For an annual license to use his program it costs an individual $40. For a financial advisor the cost is $200 per year. It would seem to me he will never need social security. He already has it if you know what I mean.

I wonder if it really produces accurate results given the program's rules, regulations, policies, administrative letters, etc. Thanks for the post but this just tells me yet one more government program has yielded the tax payer more expense than good.

They say SS will run out of money in 10 to 20 years. I say it is because of the dollars eaten up by the bureaucracy with all the rules and procedures mentioned above. If we could cut that red tape, we'd save billions of dollars a year.

Wow! I just found several billion dollars. How do I get paid for that?