(Part 1 of 2)

The bottom slice of bread in the Dakota sandwich is recognized as the home to Mt. Rushmore, but South Dakota is holding something just as valuable but much less known. The Office of the State Treasurer currently holds tens of millions of dollars in South Dakota unclaimed money that belongs to people living in the state. With one of the smallest state populations in the United States, South Dakota residents have great odds of discovering cash owed to them, if they know where to look.

Increased efforts by the state to hand back lost money to the rightful owners have helped give back an average of $2.2 million each year in recent years, but most of it still goes unreturned, because an average of $6.7 million is turned over to the state each year. This basically means that the state's total grows by roughly $5 million each year. So while the State Treasury Department provides no exact total, it is reasonable to assume that they are holding at least tens of millions.

After first hearing about unclaimed money, the main question many people have is – How could people possibly abandon that much cash? There are a number of reasons, but believe it or not there actually are tens of billions up for grabs across the nation. Most of the time, though, it's as simple as not notifying everyone of the right forwarding address. Once a check of some kind is returned to a property holder, or a holder just loses contact with the owner, a "dormancy period" begins. The dormancy period is a time period which must pass before the cash is determined to be "unclaimed" or abandoned, and then passed along to the state for holding purposes.

There are a number of kinds of properties that can become unclaimed money if left inactive for a long enough time period, but the State Treasury's web site lists the following as the most common: savings accounts, checking accounts, unpaid wages or commissions, stocks, underlying shares, un-cashed dividends, customer deposits or overpayments, certificates of deposit, credit balances, refunds, money orders, paid-up life insurance policies, un-cashed benefits checks, and gift certificates. Each of these types of accounts has its own individual dormancy period. In South Dakota, these periods range from 1 to 15 years, depending on what kind of asset is being discussed.

(to be continued)

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