Unclaimed Property Blog

Ever go to a store and realize you do not have enough cash in hand for even that small purchase. Then to make it more embarrassing the clerk says you have to have a $15.00 minimum purchase to use your credit or debit card? Is this legal?

OK, let’s assume a lot of the smaller merchants don’t know the rules for accepting cards from Visa and MasterCard, rather than they don’t follow them.

Are you confused about what a home equity loan and line of credit are? Read on and you will find the difference between the two and perhaps other useful data.

First thing you should know is what home equity is. Equity is the difference between how much the home is worth and how much you owe on the home. What you owe is the amount left to pay off the mortgage or mortgages as the case may be.

Here is some math on that. You purchased your home for $300,000. At the time of purchase you paid $50,000 as the down payment. This left a balance of $250,000 (your mortgage). The equity amount at this time is the down payment amount ($50,000).

You may already know the most obvious reasons for debt and a few may surprise you. Here are some of the most common reasons:

* Medical expenses. You leave one company and do not start right away leaving a gap in coverage. Sometimes your coverage is not adequate and you have to cover the remainder. Medical bills add up and of course there is the demand for payment upon delivery of the service. Thus you put it on your credit card adding to your financial debt.

It’s that time of year when most of us take vacations. Here are some tips on credit card usage.

Even before you leave for foreign destinations or even to another state, make a note of the number to call if your card is lost or stolen. Call the 800 number while at home and ask if this is a valid number to call from out of the country, often it is not. The bank or lender can give you a number to call from your destination country.

Also ask what the policy is for a replacement card when out of the country. Some companies can send you a new one within 24 to 48 hours.

Parents would like their children to become responsible with money. Here are some things you can do to teach them about saving.

One way to encourage them to save is to give them a goal. Ideally this is to save for something that they really want and can be done in a short amount of time, like a CD or DVD rather than an iPod. This is a faster way to show them saving doesn’t have to take a long time.

Unclaimed money is not just something that Americans have. Our neighbor to the North also has the dilemma of returning money to rightful owners.

In this case we are looking at one bank, the Bank of Canada. It was reported that as of January 1, 2006 the bank was holding 854,000 dormant bank accounts totalling $270 million. The largest single account has a balance of $423,598.58.

With amounts of money like that you may wonder how someone would forget about it. There are sudden deaths where the relatives have no knowledge of this account. The bank does not have a current address and therefore cannot contact the rightful heir. The most common reason for an abandoned account is the owner relocates and does not inform the bank of the move.

The IRS has lost a lawsuit regarding a tax on phone bills. The result is that taxpayers will no longer have to pay this tax and will also be getting money back.

A while back there was a blog on this tax. You may recall that telephone bills had a 3% federal excise tax on long-distance services. The bill permitting this tax was originally enacted in 1898 to fund the Spanish-American War. Several lawsuits were filed regarding this tax be abolished and refunded. The IRS has lost the right to charge this and the Treasury now has to refund approximately $13 billion to taxpayers.

Sometimes your deposit and your debit don’t quite make it onto your checking account as planned. You look up your balance on the internet and the deposit is there. Are you safe in spending it?

Here is the story of a man in Georgia who does online banking. He made a deposit and checked his account and found the deposit was posted. Nothing was noted stating the deposit was on hold or the funds not available, so he wrote checks against this money. Several days later his bank returned his checks with fees for insufficient funds; stating the deposit was on hold. This notification was after the deposit was posted on the online statement. To make matters worse for him were the fees that the bank charged for the “bounced” checks totaled $400.00.

Back-to-school shopping can be costly. Some states have decided to waive the sales tax on particular purchases.

Thirteen states and the District of Columbia are offering shoppers a sales tax holiday this year. The majority of states will be doing this on the first weekend of August.

Be sure to schedule your shopping trip during these times for extra savings. And before you bring your purchases to the register, make sure the items qualify. Some purchases will save you sales-tax dollars, others will not. Participating states have a detailed list of their sales-tax-exempt items. Each state can and does have varying products and dates of the sale, so be sure you know before you go.

You read the headlines about states having millions of dollars to give to rightful owners. Tempting? Here is a story about someone that got caught cheating.

Florida has found Michael Bronstein, 37 guilty of stealing almost one million dollars from the state’s Bureau of Unclaimed Property. Bronstein plead guilty and was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison.

Bronstein was sentenced May 25 for his participation in an elaborate scheme to file fraudulent claims for unclaimed property.

The Florida Bureau of Unclaimed Property has more than $1 billion in cash and unclaimed property from dormant bank accounts, uncashed payroll checks and abandoned safe deposit boxes.