EPISODE 34 ~ FIND YOURS: FDIC Insurance: How To Find Your Lost Money if Your Bank Went Under

Our find yours topic for today is how to locate missing funds held by the FDIC.

FDIC stands for Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.  The FDIC is the independent federal agency that insures banks.  More specifically, it insures YOUR deposits in banks.  The FDIC was established by President Franklin Roosevelt after the stock market crash that led to the Great Depression.  The idea was to make sure people wouldn’t panic again and pull their money out of the nation’s banks all at once.  So, today, if a bank goes under, the FDIC is going to pay you back.  Well, it’ll pay up to $250,000 per depositor, which is plenty for most of us.

The FDIC maintains a webpage where you can search for money you left in a now defunct bank. When you get there, you search by your name or your business name.  There are also fields for  the name of the failed bank and the city and state where it was based, although I found just entering a last name generates results and sometimes a broader search is better.

If you find your name, then you fill out an FDIC claim form right on the website, have it notarized and mail it in.  The FDIC will respond by phone, mail or by sending you a check within 30 days.  Not bad, for a federal bureaucracy!

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