Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Ea$y come, ea$y go

Money in the Bank When I was a kid with a paper route and a shovel, I was good with my money. I hoarded every nickel and penny in an old lock box under the bed, breaking it out every now and then to roll up the change to convert to bills.

Money in the Bank

When I was a kid with a paper route and a shovel, I was good with my money. I hoarded every nickel and penny in an old lock box under the bed, breaking it out every now and then to roll up the change to convert to bills. I was slowly amassing a fortune.

I had no plans for that money – with Christmas and birthday almost six months apart, I could get almost anything I needed after a short weight. I was content just to collect it.

Then my brother, who used to blow ever cent he made, found the lockbox, and brought it to my parents. They were afraid I would blow it all on Colecovision games (post Atari game console), or something pointless like the G.I. Joe Aircraft Carrier or Hovercraft, and took me to the bank to open up an account.

What my parents didn’t realize was that hoarding was my hobby – even now when I have a lot of cash lying around I can’t resist stacking it into perfect little piles. Putting my money in the bank somehow devalued it for me, reducing my precious booty to mere numbers on a page. I wasn’t impressed with the nickel and dime interest payments I received, and I never went back to make deposits nearly as frequently as I used to go under the bed to drop my change in the lockbox.

My brother, the opposite of me in every way, liked his passbook and the interest he received a lot. He became frugal and cheap while I went out of my way to spend almost every penny I earned.

I gradually lost interest in the account for the next five years, when I got my first real job at a grocery store. I opened up a new savings account in a different bank across the street from where I worked for the convenience of it all.

Most of the money in my first account was converted into Canada Savings Bonds, and left to rot in my mom’s jewelry box for another five years – it helped me through university, but since it went from bond to cheque to university on paper, I never saw my precious pile again.

What I didn’t realize was that there was a balance left over in the first account. I forgot all about it. I figure I’m owed at least $40, if not more.

Until I really needed it, that is, which is pretty much all of the time these days.

Luckily, though the bank may close your little-used and insignificant account, a mere pimple on their hard drives, that money never really goes away.

When there has been no owner activity in relation to an account for a period of 10 years, and the owner cannot be traced (without actually doing any research, i.e. looking up your Social Insurance Number to find your last known address) the money is turned over to the Bank of Canada for safekeeping. If it’s over $500, they will hold the money indefinitely. If it’s less than that, they will claim it after 20 years.

There is a lot of unclaimed money out there. At the end of December 1999, the Bank of Canada held approximately 736,400 unclaimed balances, worth over $158 million. The majority, over 89 per cent, were under $500, but that total only represented about 29 per cent of the total balances. Eleven per cent of the unclaimed accounts are worth 71 per cent of that money, with the oldest balance dating back to 1900 – while checking to see whether you have any unclaimed cash, you might want to find out whether your parents, grandparents and great grandparents have any outstanding balances.

Once the account is transferred to the Bank of Canada, all interest payments stop, so don’t expect to discover that the $200 bucks your great grand-daddy socked away in ought-four to be worth millions.

To find your unclaimed money, use the Bank of Canada’s search engine at http://ucbswww.bank-banque-canada.ca/scripts/search_english.asp .

By the way, since it has been more than 10 years since I had a paper route and a shovel, I can pretty much kiss my $40 goodbye. I like to think that it’s out there somewhere doing something good, maybe filling a pothole on the Trans-Canada, or building a fence in a national park.

Ah, who am I kidding – it’s gone. Don’t let it happen to you.

Twice Unlucky

Last week, a 40 year computer technician by the name of Melvin Milligan found an old lottery ticket in a drawer. Curious, he took it down to the store and discovered that it was worth $46 million – and that there were just days remaining before the year-end deadline to claim it.

It’s incredible to think that for a whole year an actual millionaire got up early and lived in New Jersey when he could have been sleeping in and living someplace nice.

It inspired me to go through my trove of old lottery tickets, which I just can’t bring myself to throw away.

For most of the major lotteries (6/49, Super 7) you have a full year to collect your prizes. Visit the MyBC.com archives at www2.mybc.com/lotteries/ for all of the results from the past year.

If, once again, you come up empty, there’s always the couch. Baggy pants and jittery friends are a gold mine.