Coming into money

So about a week ago, I got a letter from an attorney office in Sacramento. I saw the envelope sitting in our mail slot when I came home for lunch. And curious, I took it back to work with me. Apparently, or so the letter said, the state of California owes me approximately $500 that I've never claimed. This firm, it turns out, specializes in retrieving unclaimed property from the state and would be happy to get my money for me for a small fee . . . a "special" rate even, below their regular fee. How lucky am I? I was still laughing about it as I walked into work and told a few people about it, expecting them to get a kick out of it as I did. Not a bad scam, huh? Pretty clever, actually. If I were an old person, I might have totally fallen for it. AND honestly, they just wanted $25, even I was tempted to just send in the money to see what happened.

But to my surprise, one of our admins ' reaction was, "Oh, why would you pay some one? You can get it yourself!" Turns out that there IS such a thing. Apparently, the state of California does have thousands of dollars go unclaimed each year, and they keep track of it. In my case, I'm due about $589, some of it from a paycheck that I never cashed from a temp agency back when I was just out of undergrad. The rest is from an insurance company. I think it must be from an accident I was in like 10 yrs ago. It wasn't my fault but the other guy kept fighting it, and I never got my deductible from his insurance company. I remember the insurance company writing me for like a year and a half, telling me that my claim was still in arbitration. And eventually, I just forgot about it. I guess they lost track of me after they completed arbitration (who even knows when that might have been), and its been waiting for me this whole time.

Not a bad deal, I got to say. Now, all I have to is find all the info they want from me to claim it (a social security card, proof of old addresses, proof that I used to have that insurance, etc). Sounds like there might be a few hoops involved, but I guess $589 isn't a bad payout for a little bit of digging through old records. We'll see. . .

If you're at all curious to know if you're owed any money, you can run a search of your name on their site. Who knows, maybe you've got millions just waiting to be claimed. :)