The Foreign Service Journal, May 2019

52 MAY 2019 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Reclaim YourUnclaimed Property FS KNOW-HOW BY LOR I JOHNSON Lori Johnson is an FSO currently serving as management officer at Embassy Tirana. She previously served in Khartoum, Prague, Hyderabad, Mexico City and Washington, D.C. E ven a losing bet can pay off, I’ve discovered. I have long teased my dad, an attorney who spe- cializes in wills, trusts and estates, about his fasci- nation with unclaimed property. As he explained to me, that term describes items lost or abandoned by their rightful owners. They can range from stocks, bonds and insurance policies to unclaimed pension benefits, income tax refunds, jewelry, uncashed checks, safe deposit boxes and medical reimbursements. By law, states are required to safe- guard this property until claimed by the owner. Even though Dad regularly found property for his clients in Montana, I found the subject personally irrelevant. One day, though, he bet me that I had unclaimed property in one of the 50 states. He was right! Virginia had two potential claims for me that each exceeded $50. Where to Start? Discovering that you have unclaimed property is more com- mon than you might suppose. To find yours, first think about where it might be. Foreign Service personnel are most likely to have unclaimed property in Virginia, Maryland or Washington, D.C., simply because we move in and out of the D.C. area frequently. But explore all pos- sible options. For example, did you get a last-minute offer to join the Foreign Service, and move quickly from somewhere outside the Washington area to start training? Did you have a summer job in a state, but never lived there again? Next, consider all types of claims. It’s unlikely you’ll end up with a major windfall, but you won’t know unless you check. In one recent case, the Louisiana Treasury Department paid out $2.3 million in inherited oil royalties to a state resident! (The state treasurer was quick to note that this was the largest payout ever made in Louisiana, and that the average payout is closer to $900.) Similarly, news articles pop up occasionally about early purchasers of Apple stock who forgot about their investment, and are surprised to discover that their original purchase has skyrocketed in value. But other less dramatic possibilities abound, including cases where a company initiated the individual’s stock purchase. In 2000, for example, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company converted into a for-profit public company. In doing so, it gave most of its insurance policyholders a choice: cash, or stock in the new company. According to press reports, the company ended up issuing a total of 500 million shares of stock to nine million of its policy- holders, which made MetLife the most widely held stock in the United States at the time. Nearly two decades later, not everyone who checked the stock option box remembers doing so. My mom, for example, was delighted to discover that she owned $800 in MetLife stock, thanks to a small life insurance contract my grandpa had taken out for her that was converted to stock.