Dusty money
An interesting article i looked at today, NSI - National Savings and Investments is trying to help reunite savers with £435 million that is sat in dormant saving accounts.
Some of the money dates back to 1861 but a dormant account is any one that has been ignored for at least 15 years.
One investor has had £184,000 sitting in an account since at least 1990. The last contact he had with NS&I about his investment account was from an address in Manchester.
NS&I said any account with more than £1 in it will still be gathering interest. Some accounts are so old employees have to manually calculate the interest and enter the figures into “dusty old ledgers”, their spokesman said.
There is no time limit on making a claim. The group said the most common reason people lost track of their accounts was moving house and not passing on their new address. Other money had gone untouched because people had died and their executors had not realised they had an account.
Between April and June 2007 NS&I received 196 pre-1971 passbooks which had to be converted to decimal, the oldest of which was opened in 1924!
If anyone thinks they have dusty cash in dormant accounts you can get application forms for the tracing service are available at www.nsandi.com or by calling 0845 964 5000.