Free Money from your state’s Unclaimed Property website

I suggest you go to your state’s unclaimed property site and check to see if you have any money there. In Missouri, you can sign up on their site to get an email when you have unclaimed property there.  I did that some time ago, then forgot I did.  Turns out I got an email from them about a week ago.  I figured it was SPAM and ignored it.  Then I got a reminder.  This time I decided to do a search of Missouri’s site and I did have.

Link to Missouri’s Unclaimed Property site:  http://treasurer.mo.gov/UnclaimedProperty/

I was able to find out I had over $50 there.  I had to put in the last 4 digits of my SS # to see that much.  I had no clue why I would have money there.  So, I used their online form (I did not give my SS#, which was an option).   I found out I had $107.95 but had to wait until I got my check to find out where it was from.

Here it is a week later, and I got my check for $107.95.  I was able to use a number on the check to search who it was from.  It seems it came from a liquidation from travelzoo.com.  I am familiar with travelzoo as I signed up with a free account years ago, sometime before 2007, I know…and how do I know that, you ask?  Yes, I save email.  I had newsletters from them as far back as 2007, so I figure I might have deleted some years prior to that.  Don’t judge me.  You are probably one of those who contact me to send you an email that you had deleted from yours.  You are welcome.  It also pays to be a geek during the Internet explosion years.  Ha!

Anyway, I still couldn’t figure out why I had money from travelzoo and why they didn’t just send it to me because I’ve been at the same address since 1985, way before travelzoo was even a gleam in the Internet’s eye.  So, I started doing some searching.  Travelzoo is a site that looks for cheap flights, hotels, products, etc.  It seems that back in the day, they were giving out company shares when you signed up for a free account with them.  Evidently I didn’t read the fine print and had no clue I had any shares.  In 2013, I think, they decided they wanted to get rid of us small shareholders and did some kind of stock market shenanigan to do that.  You had to file a claim before April of this year to get a check from them.  Since I didn’t know anything about this (and I checked my email to make sure they hadn’t sent me one – see how important it is to save emails?) I was not able to file a claim.  I suppose, then, they sent that money to state unclaimed properties.

Here’s the link to what I found out:  http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/11/01/travelzoo-to-effect-reverseforward-split.aspx

So, who knows, if you signed up for travelzoo all those years ago, you may have some unclaimed property waiting for you.