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I read a lot. Fantasy and science fiction mostly. In my reading, I've come across the occasional tale of a person who gets blasted into the future, walks into what now exists of their bank, and finds that the small savings account they had is worth some huge sum due to interest earnings over the last however many centuries. Futurama did it one episode.
Real life, there's a thing called dormant accounts.
Many banks charge fees if you stop using your account for 'X' amount of time. We're nicer than most banks. We only charge an inactivity fee if you have less than $100 in the account, only only after one year (plus a month, but we don't tell people that) of inactivity. Our state, however, has its own additional rule, however. After FIVE years of inactivity, if we can't get ahold of the customer to reactivate their account, it gets sent to the state as unclaimed funds.
If you have a safe deposit box, the annual fee is taken automatically from your account. Well, if your account is dormant, then that next rent isn't going to be paid. After 6 months of overdue payment, we drill and inventory the box. After three years of no content, we send the contents to the state as unclaimed items.
There are legal limits for how long we have to keep the records of closed safe deposit boxes. I'm not certain how many years it is now because in 2002, we started imaging all of our records electronically, and thus far have seen no reason to purge those records (though the older stuff is stored on harder to access compressed files of some sort).
So, if you used to have a safe deposit box with us and it has been closed, due to inactivity on an account that you say had nearly a thousand dollars in it for so long that we no longer have a record of it, that means you had to have last done anything on your account over 18 and a half years ago (10 years electronic records of the paperwork for when we send contents to the state, 3 years holding the box contents before sending them to the state, 6 months of non-payment before that, 5 years of dormancy before we closed the account).
I don't know the exact conversation as the former customer was taken aside by a manager, but apparently she moved out of state two decades ago, recently found her old safe deposit box key, went "oh yeah!" and leisurely wandered out this way a few months later while visiting a relative in the area, expecting her box to still be here.
Real life, there's a thing called dormant accounts.
Many banks charge fees if you stop using your account for 'X' amount of time. We're nicer than most banks. We only charge an inactivity fee if you have less than $100 in the account, only only after one year (plus a month, but we don't tell people that) of inactivity. Our state, however, has its own additional rule, however. After FIVE years of inactivity, if we can't get ahold of the customer to reactivate their account, it gets sent to the state as unclaimed funds.
If you have a safe deposit box, the annual fee is taken automatically from your account. Well, if your account is dormant, then that next rent isn't going to be paid. After 6 months of overdue payment, we drill and inventory the box. After three years of no content, we send the contents to the state as unclaimed items.
There are legal limits for how long we have to keep the records of closed safe deposit boxes. I'm not certain how many years it is now because in 2002, we started imaging all of our records electronically, and thus far have seen no reason to purge those records (though the older stuff is stored on harder to access compressed files of some sort).
So, if you used to have a safe deposit box with us and it has been closed, due to inactivity on an account that you say had nearly a thousand dollars in it for so long that we no longer have a record of it, that means you had to have last done anything on your account over 18 and a half years ago (10 years electronic records of the paperwork for when we send contents to the state, 3 years holding the box contents before sending them to the state, 6 months of non-payment before that, 5 years of dormancy before we closed the account).
I don't know the exact conversation as the former customer was taken aside by a manager, but apparently she moved out of state two decades ago, recently found her old safe deposit box key, went "oh yeah!" and leisurely wandered out this way a few months later while visiting a relative in the area, expecting her box to still be here.
).
(Luckily at that time and at that bank there were no fees for being overdrawn by that amount). I thnk she finally had to have a relative who still lived in that area take in a dime and give it to them to make the letters stop.
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