CNNMoney:
Americans abandon about $5 billion a year. Whatever the cause - be it stock certificates mislaid in the back of a dresser drawer or Granddad forgetting to list a savings account in his will - reuniting those lost assets with their rightful owners was a decidedly unsexy subset of the financial services industry. Until now.
What’s changing is that politicians are acting like collection agents. For more than 30 years, corporations and financial institutions have been turning over abandoned property to the state governments for ’safekeeping.’ The states used to wait 5 to 7 years before appropriating the money.
But in Alabama, California, Connecticut, Texas, New York, and other states, the dormancy period for the majority of assets is now 3 years or less. According to the state controller’s office, California received almost $900 million in unclaimed property in 2005, only $240 million of which was used to pay claims.
This shrinking time frame between assets disappearing and states taking them has created a potentially lucrative niche business that Charlie Ginsberg is poised to exploit. Ginsberg, a 66-year-old New York native and a serial entrepreneur, has been in the business of heir location since 1963. He famously reunited a 6-figure fortune with a homeless stockboy in California several years ago. Read more.
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