Your Lost Money: In New York alone, there are twice as many Abandoned Financial Accounts as Residents

94% of the owners of financial assets are very worried that if something happens to them, their families won’t be able to identify and access their assets. This was revealed by a recent survey conducted by the digital inheritance service DGLegacyⓇ among 10 000 of its clients who own digital and financial assets.

That risk is very real. In the state of New York alone, there is $17.5B in lost money, held in more than 46 million abandoned financial accounts — twice as many as the current residents of New York state!

In the USA overall, unclaimed assets have reached the unprecedented level of $100B. That’s more than the market capitalization of Ford Motor Company and General Motors combined! The figure is increasing at the alarming rate of approximately $5B per year.

The numbers are staggering, and they span different types of financial assets, such as bank accounts, insurance policy payouts, estate proceeds, company stocks and mutual funds.

Estate planning can’t protect against this as it doesn’t solve the primary problem that leads to the lost money: the family members can’t identify, locate or access the assets.

As one of the respondents to DGLegacy’s survey put it, “It’s of little value for me that my estate planning has a catch-all clause if my family doesn’t have an idea what ‘all’ is.”

In this situation, it’s not surprising that estate planning proceeds are one of the primary types of abandoned assets that don’t reach the family members.

In response to this global pandemic of abandoned digital and financial assets, digital inheritance services are emerging to cope with it.

They offer automatic detection of a fatal event happening to the asset owner and proactive sharing of the information about the assets with the designated beneficiaries. The people with whom the asset owner has shared the information are then aware of the assets and can identify and locate them.

This way, your money goes to your loved ones, instead of staying in financial institutions, online platforms and insurance companies.

As Ana Mineva, CEO at DGLegacyⓇ, commented, “ Seeing this global pandemic of abandoned financial accounts and lost money, it’s not surprising that we’re seeing a massive increase in interest in using digital inheritance services to protect people’s financial assets.”

To find out more about how DGLegacyⓇ can help you protect your digital and financial assets, please visit www.dglegacy.com.

Originally published at https://www.dglegacy.com on August 2, 2022.