(Part 1 of 2)

Wisconsin is home to a lot more American goodies than just milk and cheese. The Badger State is also home to the Green Bay Packers, catfish (Potosi, WI), and Harley Davidson Motorcycles. A fun fact I just learned about Green Bay that few know about is that it is also the toilet paper capital of the world. There is another type of paper that you can find piled up in Wisconsin's Treasury Dept. though – the good-smelling kind, green. Yes, Wisconsin unclaimed money totaling nearly $400 million is in the State Treasury's hands and they are attempting to reunite it with over one million citizens who are owed their fair share.

Unclaimed money is turned over to the Treasury Office when abandoned assets are not given back to the rightful owners after a specified period. The 'dormancy period' for Wisconsin abandoned funds is 5 years. Forgotten properties can come from several sources – uncashed savings and salary checks, lost or unused gift checks, stock dividends, lost traveler's checks, forgotten bank accounts, and other financial assets that have been forgotten about and lost track of. The only tangible assets covered under the Wisconsin Unclaimed Funds Law are the contents of safety deposit boxes that have been deemed abandoned. The State Treasurer's Office tries to track down the owners of family heirlooms, pocket watches, sports cards, coins, jewelry, etc. but ultimately has to auction them off at eBay after three years. "There are a lot of safety deposit boxes that get turned over to us which a lot of people don't tell their kids, 'Hey we have a safety deposit box.' So we actively search for those owners for three years and if we can't find them we auction off the contents of the boxes. We do that on eBay," said State Treasurer Dawn Marie Sass.

(to be continued)

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