Have you received a notification about unclaimed property? How to find an assignment of mortgage if you need to prove that unclaimed property from the mortgage company belong to you.  

Q: How do I find an assignment of mortgage to prove that the monies in the division of unclaimed property for my state belongs to us? I have looked all through the county records and cannot find it. The mortgage companies that we dealt with back then are all out of business or have been bought by other banks based offshore and can’t seem to find those records.

A: We’re unsure what money you might have with a lender that is unclaimed. There are times that mortgage lenders will retain money on behalf of their borrowers but rarely will those funds end up as unclaimed funds. We’re guessing that you might have had a balance in an tax escrow account with a lender or paid off a mortgage with your lender and that lender mailed you the balance in an tax escrow account or overpayment on a payoff and you failed to cash the check.

Once you failed to cash the check, the lender may have tried to pay you again and if that check once again went uncashed, the lender might have held onto those funds waiting for you to claim them and when you didn’t the law in your state required the lender to send the funds to the state as “unclaimed funds.”

So if your funds ended up with the state, the state should have those funds tied to your name and social security number. We’re unsure why the state would need you to jump through hurdles to get your money back. If they are making you jump through hoops, then we’d suggest the following to see if you can get the information they want from you. But first, you need to understand exactly what it is that they are looking for.

If the state needs information to tie you to the funds, you may be able to find one of your account statements from your lender when you were still in the home. You may even have some of the tax forms they sent you. While lender’s names may change, the loan account numbers frequently stay the same. You might be able to persuade the state to look at the account number for your loan and use that to have them release the funds. If they truly need to tie your home loan to the name of the lender and the name of the lender changed there are several issues that come to mind.

If the loan changed hands while you owned the loan, the lender may have recorded an assignment of mortgage against your property. You might be able to go to the recorder’s office or other office that files or accepts property liens and see if you can track it down there.Your  problem may be that some lenders never filed the assignment of mortgages but you would have received a statement from the old lender telling you that they transferred the loan and a statement from the new lender telling you that they have purchased the loan.

In both cases, you should (or may still) have that paperwork. If you don’t have that paperwork and don’t have copies of your tax documents with the lender information and your account number, you’re in trouble.

If you know the lender that acquired your loan, you may be able to call them up and ask to be transferred to the lien release department. When you get to that department, you can request a copy of the lien release documents and hope that that the information they send you will satisfy the requirements of your state’s abandoned property department. Good luck and let us know if you get the funds back.