Celebrate National Unclaimed Property Day! (Episode 295)

Well, good afternoon Michiganders.

It is Tuesday, January 30, 2024.

And of course, this is Tuesday with Tom, Michigan's only weekly podcast where we do answer your questions about estate planning and estate settlement in Michigan. And we don't send you a bill.

As always, I'm your host, Tom Doyle, estate planning attorney, lifelong Michigan resident, and ambassador for all things good in this great state of Michigan.

Welcome, welcome to today's program.

Well, last week's episode, should I name my children as joint or co-successor trustees?

If you're looking at having a trust prepared for you and you're wondering, I've got more than one child, should I make them joint trustees or perhaps co-trustees? I encourage you listen to last week's episode where I talk what those mean, whether it's joint or co- and so that you can make an intelligent decision about how you want to name your children as your successor trustees.

Well, today, January 30th in two days, obviously, it's going to be February 1st, happens to be a leap year this year, but that's not what we're going to talk about today.

On February 1st, we are going to celebrate National Unclaimed Property Day.

But please remember that what I'm about to discuss during the program is, as always, for educational purposes, it is not intended to be legal advice. You need to work with your attorney, financial advisor, tax advisor to determine what is appropriate for you and your estate plan.


Let's celebrate National Unclaimed Property Day.

So what, let's start with, what is unclaimed property?

For those of you who don't know about it, that's, for example, Michigan Department of Treasury. Michigan Department of Treasury literally has millions of dollars of lost or forgotten assets. Might be from dormant bank accounts, uncast checks, valuables that were left in a safety deposit box, or maybe stock certificates. Those are the kinds of things that end up being turned over to the Michigan Department of Treasury.

Because they were considered abandoned and unclaimed by the bank, the bank isn't going to hold on to those funds forever. They are in fact going to turn those funds over to the Michigan Department of Treasury. So the Michigan Department of Treasury is the custodian of these assets.

And quite frankly, any asset, be it tangible or intangible, that belongs to a third party, that remains unclaimed for a specified time period, and that time period is set forth under Michigan's Uniform Unclaimed Property Act.

But if it's been there, pursuant and beyond that time period, then it is required to be turned over to the Michigan Department of Treasury.

For example, uncashed payroll checks Uncashed payroll checks have to be turned over to the state after one year. Most other property types may be vendor checks, accounts receivable, credit balances, etc. Normally have to be turned over after three years.

Additionally, government entities have to turn over unclaimed property.

So what ends up happening is all of this property gets turned over to the Michigan Department of Treasury, literally millions of dollars sitting there.

And National Unclaimed Property Day being February 1st is the annual day where we encourage you to take a look, find out if the state of Michigan has any of your unclaimed property. Because if they do, they have to turn it over to you.

So how do you make a claim for unclaimed property?

Well, you're going to go to, there's a website, unclaimedproperty.michigan.gov, and there you can do a property search. You can enter your name and search for property to see if anything comes up in that search.

And if you end up with maybe too many results, and maybe you have a common name, and a lot of people with that name in the state of Michigan, you can try narrowing the search down by maybe a city or a zip code.But the idea is you can conduct a search online to find out if the state of Michigan has your unclaimed property.

And once you've found that, simply click the claim button, and then go through the process online, where you're going to review the properties that you select. You're going to enter your information about those as being requested by it. It's going to include things like your current mailing address. They're going to want to know where your relationship is to the owner.

Maybe you're the owner of the property, or maybe you're an heir of the property.

I know when we are involved in settling estates, one of the things that we always do is run a check for unclaimed property, because very often, you will find in settling an estate that there is property out there that an heir is entitled to receive.

You might be asked to confirm address information, or the computer might ask you to do it, but essentially, you're ultimately going to submit your claim, is what you're going to do.

Now, most of the claims are going to require a completed and signed claim form, as well as photo ID and legal document listing social security numbers. So it will be all self-explanatory on the website. There is a way to upload your documents through the website. You can also mail your documents. There's going to be an address on the website.

But the idea is you search, you find, you submit an application to receive, you submit the additional documentation that the state of Michigan is going to require of you.

Now, you can, because one of the things that's going to happen is they will issue you a claim number, you can go back to the website, click on the status page to see where things stand on looking for your, to see if you're qualified to be the recipient for the unclaimed property.

Now, before we go any further than that, you can always ask this question, well, is there a way for me to stop my property from being turned over to the state?

Well, there are certain things that you could do to try and prevent your property from ever being turned over to the state.

Keep all records in the accurate and current.

Make sure you know where your accounts are so that you don't have lost bank accounts there, or make sure you've cashed all those checks that have been provided to you, etc.

When you move, provide companies that have your property with a change of addresses.

If you've got a bank account, and you move and you don't notify the bank of your new address, eventually that property is likely going to be turned over for unclaimed property.

Obviously, again, cash all the checks that you receive, and always notify family members or perhaps another trusted person of the location of your financial records, because sometimes what will happen is a person will die.

Family doesn't know that there might be a bank account that they're not aware of, and maybe that bank account hasn't been turned over to the state yet.

So maybe it's not going to show up in the list then of unclaimed property, yet that bank account would still be out there.

You're going to want to make sure that somebody can find that for you.

So it's a pretty simple process.

Go online, I encourage you, obviously, you don't have to wait till February 1st to do it. You can do it anytime that you want to do it. But February 1st is kind of an annual reminder to say, hey, if you might have unclaimed property, you don't, submit a search and find out if you do.

There's also on the website a phone number that you could call and do the search by phone. But doing it online is probably the quicker ways to do that.

Now, let's say that you might have property in other states. You lived previous in California or you lived in Florida or wherever it happens to be.

Well, there is the National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators. They have a website that is at unclaimed.org. And you can go to that website. You can actually search the various departments of treasury for the various states in the country to see if there's property there.

But to even make it easier, they provide a link to what they call their missing money.

And that's missingmoney.com. There'll be a link to that. It's a free website that they sponsor.

And basically, if you run a search on that website, they indicate that most states participate in that missing money feature. So the idea is you could click on one link to do a search. And when you do that search, it will display any of the states in which there's a match and then provide the information and links to the various government websites for those states.

So if you run a search and it comes up and it shows, hey, you do have property in California and you know you lived in California before, you'll have a link, you can click on that, and then there's the process for submitting that claim in California.

So they've tried to make it easy, so you don't actually have to go search each individual state's website.

So on a national basis, you also have the ability to do.

Now, interesting, according to the information from the National Association of Unclaimed Property Owners, the average, the average value of unclaimed property is just over $2,000.

So it costs you nothing to conduct the search, so take a little bit of time to do that. Again, you don't have to wait till February 1st.

You can do it maybe just once a year or once every couple of years or whatever you want to do.

And if you have children, do it for your children or have your children do it, or you have family members, encourage them all to go out and search, because otherwise the money is just sitting there.

And if it's your money, or money, why are you going to have your money just sitting there with the state of Michigan?

Just one further note, too.

Obviously, Amanda and I would be honored to have the opportunity to help you protect your loved ones, either by putting together your estate plan, or amending a plan, or assisting you in settling an estate.

But aside from that, you might sometimes receive a letter from a company professing to have found property that is owed to you, and in return for a fee, they will collect that property on your behalf.

Well, what many of those companies are actually doing, they're just doing a search, the same search that you can do, and when they find that information identified as being yours, they'll send you a letter and return for a fee.

They'll take a cut, okay, at their fee, and return for processing your claim.

Well, if you get one of those letters and it identifies where the property is, go do the search yourself and find the property yourself, I would submit, rather than providing funds to somebody else to do exactly what you could do.

But get back to what we could help.

Now, we could help you do a search if that was something that you want to do as well, but encourage you to visit our website, doylelawpc.com.

There you're going to find information on how to schedule an in-person consultation at the East Lansing office, information on how to schedule virtual consultations via Zoom or telephone. We can likely help you with your estate plan, wherever it is that you happen to be in the state of Michigan.

Also, you will find at our website, our legal store, and that gives you the ability to order individual legal documents. Maybe all you need is a certificate of trust because you're trying to sell real estate that's in a trust, or you simply need a new health care power of attorney. Before you schedule a consultation, if you already know that's what you need, simply head on to the legal store, submit your information there, and once we have it, we'll determine if we need to have a consultation with you before we actually prepare the requested document and send it to you electronically.

So again, that's at doylelawpc.com.

Well, I think that's going to be it for today's show.

As always though, if you have a comment about the program, a topic that you'd like to have me discuss or questions that you'd like to have answered, you can send me an email, that would be tom at Tuesday with Tom, or as I noted in last week's episode, we have a new website, still at the same address, tuesdaywithtom.com, but one of the features that's available on our new website, there's a microphone, you can click on that, you can leave me a voice message. You can leave me a voice message about what you thought about the program, or perhaps tell me about a topic that you'd like to have me discuss as a later date.Obviously, don't use it requesting personal legal advice because we're not going to be able to provide that to you, but it's another way to communicate with me about what you think about the show.

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Well, thank you again for spending some of your time with us today.

And as always, I hope that you have an awesome day and an awesome week in Michigan.

Stay safe.

Tuesday with Tom has been brought to you by the estate planning attorneys at Doyle Law PC.

To learn how we can help you with your estate plan or with settling a loved one's estate, please call us today at 517-323-7366.

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