The Southernmost of the Dakotas may be home to the national treasure that is Mt. Rushmore, but ND is holding it's own treasure that's nothing to sneeze at. According to the website of the State Land Department, there are currently more than $23 million in North Dakota unclaimed money, waiting to be reunited with the citizens who lost track of it somewhere along the way. The only thing standing between these citizens and their money, beyond knowledge of the existence of these assets, is the knowledge of how to track them down and reclaim them.

North Dakotans are lucky to live in a state that ranks among the top 5 in the nation for percentage of unclaimed fund returned to residents. At the same time, the state has one of the smallest populations in the country, at just over 640,000. What this means is that ND residents have great odds of discovering and taking back money that is rightfully theirs.

The first rule of searching for unclaimed property is to search frequently. One of the biggest mistakes searchers often make is to search only once on the first website they find that has a search box and end their search there. This doesn't take in to account that the vast majority of missing money websites don't have accurate data, and even the state's official records are often slow to be updated. This is a problem, not only because someone in a state office has to manually input the record once it's been given to the state, but because there are different periods of time which must pass, unique to each type of abandoned asset, before they are turned over to the state.

Some of the most common types of forgotten funds are dormant savings and checking accounts, stocks, bonds, mutual funds, refunds, wages, payroll, salary, money orders, paid-up life insurance policies, deposits, commissions, uncashed checks, death benefits, dividends, insurance payments, and others. Most of these have dormancy periods of 1-5 years, which means that if it's only been 1 or 2 years when a person searches; they will not find a record for an asset that has a dormancy period of 3 or more years.

In addition to needing to search the right websites often, many people don't realize that they should search records outside of North Dakota. Believe it or not, a person could theoretically have never been outside of the state of ND, but have money owed to them in other states. This occurs when assets from insurance companies or employers originate in other states. Often times the actual corporate headquarters for an employer exists in a state separate from where given employee works. For this reason, unclaimed monies being held by institutions in these situations will be handed over to the proper division of the company's home state's treasury department. What this means is that North Dakota will never have any record of this cash, so a resident who wishes to locate and claim it will need to use the same search strategies in other states.

These are just few of the most common issues that hinder the searches of uninformed ND citizens. But people can overcome these issues, and countless others, by spending a little bit of time educating themselves on the search practices used by professional searchers before putting their own feet in the water.