$32 billion in unclaimed money is floating around America

A Kansas City woman received an unclaimed $6.1 million check from Missouri on Wednesday. The money is from an unclaimed property fund consisting of a single security, Yahoo Finance News reported. 

"There is so much money that's out there waiting for Americans to claim," Claude Zweifel, Missouri's state treasurer, told Good Morning America, who took on the task of hunting down unclaimed money. "Just to give you an example, in Missouri alone I have more than 600 million dollars on hand waiting for Missourians." 

Though Missouri's latest payout is the largest sum of unclaimed money ever given in America, it is just a sliver of the $32 billion floating around the United States waiting to be claimed by its rightful owners, the Washington Post reported. That sum doesn't include additional billions in unredeemed US bonds, unclaimed pensions and income tax refunds returned to the IRS as undeliverable, The Huffington Post reported. 

Unclaimed money may be in limbo for any number of reasons: moving without providing accurate forwarding addresses, unknowingly being named a beneficiary of an insurance policy or account, forgetting about bank accounts or rebates, changing names after a marriage or divorce. The list goes on. 

But it's relatively easy to track down. Every state has an unclaimed property database, which can be found on the state government’s website. Americans wondering if they've got cash out there somewhere can also use MissingMoney.com, a database created by the National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators (NAUPA). 

Have you reclaimed money from your state treasury? What would you do with extra funds? Let us know in the comments.