McRae: $11k in YOUR Name?
By Treasurer David McRae
Can you imagine reaching into the pocket of an old pair of jeans and finding an $11,000 check? Seems unimaginable, right? But that was essentially what happened to one Okolona resident at my team’s Unclaimed Money Open House this week.
To be honest, that wasn’t even the largest amount of unclaimed money we’ve found. A Mississippian once recovered $1.2 million during their search! That is a life-changing amount to find.
While most who search the state’s unclaimed money database won’t find a million dollars, many will find hundreds and even thousands of dollars in their name. In fact, the average claim in Mississippi is around $2,000 – enough to fund your summer vacation!
So, all this begs the question: what is unclaimed money and how do you find it?
Unclaimed money comes about when a person loses track of money that belongs to them. It might be an inheritance from a long-lost relative, a stock you forgot you had, or a refund check from the electric company that went to the wrong address. Once the money is deemed inactive or lost by a financial institution, it is turned over to the State Treasury to reunite the funds with their rightful owner. Unclaimed money is not Mississippi’s money; it’s your missing money. We simply need to find you and give it back.
My team has made it a priority to return this money at a record-breaking pace. All told, we’ve returned $140 million to Mississippians, more than any Treasurer in state history. As part of this, our team has embarked on a new system of proactive returns, running our databases through various contact systems to find you and give the funds back without any action required on your part. This system was put to particularly good use when we matched funds back to disaster areas to get money in people’s hands within a week of this spring’s devastating tornadoes.
Returning unclaimed money puts funds back in the pockets of those who rightfully earned them, but it also gets money back into circulation here in Mississippi – and that’s good for all of us. Whether you have $11,000 of missing money or $110, it’s worth the search. Visit treasury.ms.gov/search to begin today.
Mississippi Treasurer David McRae is the 55th Treasurer for the State of Mississippi. In this role, he helps manage the state’s cash flow, oversees College and Career Savings Mississippi, and has returned more than $140 million in unclaimed money to Mississippians. For more information, visit Treasury.MS.gov
