Refunds and Rebates Worth Checking

A few years ago I helped my mother go through a stack of paperwork that had built up on her kitchen counter, and we found, in the course of an afternoon, about eleven hundred dollars she had not known she was owed. An old utility deposit. A warranty rebate she had never mailed in. A pharmacy benefit she had not claimed. None of it was hidden. It was simply paperwork she had set aside one evening and never quite returned to.

The category of money I am describing is not glamorous and it does not, by itself, change anyone's financial life. But for most adults there is, somewhere in the system, a sum that is theirs and that they have not yet asked for. The work of finding it is mostly an afternoon's worth of small phone calls and form-filling. Here is where I would start.

Begin with your state's unclaimed property database. Every state runs one — usually under the treasurer's or comptroller's office — and the search is free. It indexes old bank accounts, uncashed payroll checks, refunded deposits from former landlords, insurance payouts that never reached the recipient. The official portal for most states is missingmoney.com. Search every state you have ever lived in, and search under any prior names.

Utility companies are the second place to look. Most issue rebates for efficient appliances, weatherization, or program enrollment, and most of these go unclaimed because the form sits inside a PDF that nobody reads. Call the customer service line and ask, directly, what rebates you are eligible for. The answer is sometimes nothing. It is often more than nothing.

Warranty claims are the third. Almost everyone has, in a drawer somewhere, a small appliance or a piece of luggage that failed inside its warranty window and was never returned. The manufacturer, in most cases, will still honor it years after the fact, especially if the product was registered. The phone call takes ten minutes.

The last category is class-action settlements. If you have used any major bank, airline, retailer, or app in the last decade, there is a reasonable chance you are eligible for a payout from a settlement you never heard about. The site classaction.org maintains a current list. The payouts are usually small — twenty dollars, fifty, occasionally several hundred — but the claim form is, in most cases, a single page.