August 12, 2021
Where to Find Long Lost Inheritance?
Where to Find Long Lost Inheritance?
In this episode, Chris Berry answers the question: Where to look for an Inheritance?
Estate Attorney and Advisor Chris Berry of Castle Wealth Group answers questions on retirement and estate planning every Wednesday at 1pm. Register via this link or give our office a call at 844-885-4200.
Castle Wealth Group and Christopher Berry help families with estate planning, elder law, retirement planning, and tax planning from their offices in Brighton, Ann Arbor, Livonia, Bloomfield Hills, and Novi.
Castle Wealth Group helps families with their legal, financial, and tax planning for their retirement and legacy.
With the use of legal structures like revocable living trusts, Castle Trusts (asset protection trusts), Chris Berry and Castle Wealth Group can help your family plan, protect, and preserve what is important through their Retirement and Legacy Blueprint Process.
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https://michiganestateplanning.com/
Resources:
https://unclaimedproperty.michigan.gov/
Episode Transcript
Where to look for an inheritance? Welcome to Berry’s Bites. Please join our host attorney and financial advisor Chris Berry. So this question the person submitted said that someone passed away a number of years ago there might have been a trust or a will how do you find out if you were entitled to any benefits this is a tough question because you can’t just like call up different places and say “hey do you have money that’s sitting for me?”
There’s a couple of things first of all when someone passes away there should be a will that’s recorded at the county now that doesn’t always happen because that’s really only for probate but anything that’s at the county is public records so you could go to the county and see if a loved one passed away to see if they had a will. Now that might not be helpful because the will might not have been recorded and then if the will was recorded chances are it might say everything goes into a trust.
This tells you that there are no assets going through probate so there’s no public record and that’s why a lot of people like a trust because they don’t want to create a public record they want to keep things out of the public record so really then your only other options would be to try to reach out to maybe the law office that created that last trust but understand with attorney-client privilege.
Chances are they’re not going to share much with you the only other option and I think each state has something similar to this michigan does as well and you could probably google it but there is a like michigan lost property where if you were named as a beneficiary after a certain period of time it goes to the state of Michigan holds it kind of in a fund for a period of time and sometimes you’ll get notices like there’s like personal private detective or private investigator firms that will like kind of go through these records and they’ll send you something and say “hey, we’ll take care of this but we get ten percent of the cut” really all you have to do is log on to the website and you can probably find it by it’s like michigan.gov and then if you just search around for lost property the site will come up and then you just fill out a one-page affidavit send it in and then they’ll notify you if you’re entitled to anything so that would be the route i’d go is go to the michigan.gov website click around or if you email me I can try to find it and email it over and then you just submit the one-page form i’ve done it a couple times I think I did inherit like four thousand dollars from that so it’s something worthwhile. Thank you