We've provided many links and tips that we hope will help you recover lost money yourself at no (or at least low) cost. Some searches are easy, web-based exercises. But others take time and effort you may not want to spend.

There are many for-profit search websites that can locate lost property for you. This may be a worthwhile purchase if you're short of time and looking for assets outside Canada (especially in the United States), as many unclaimed property databases exist for everything from utility refunds, to unclaimed gift certificates, to damage deposits for apartment rentals.

Before you go paying for help, here's another free site that gathers information from a variety of public sources and can point you in directions that may help in your quest: If you have unclaimed money somewhere in the United States, chances are the National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators will have a good chance of finding it.

The NAUPA sponsors a free site that can link to dozens of U.S. state unclaimed property databases at MissingMoney.com.

Beware of scam sites

In March 2008, the Pennsylvania attorney general sued the operators of one unclaimed money site after state investigators entered the names of Batman, Spiderman and Wile E. Coyote in the search box and were told unclaimed money was waiting for all of them. The specific details were vague. More info would be made available … once $24.95 was sent.

There are also dozens of web-based firms that can trace money for you for a fee. Many of them tease you with a free initial search that tells you that someone with your name has, say, $205, sitting with some government agency. But they won't tell you any more than that.

Only when you pay them an access fee that starts at $9.95 will they fill you in with the details of exactly what the unclaimed account is and how to claim it.

One pay site we tried found four accounts for a Mick Jagger — two accounts with almost $900 US in them and two more with "undisclosed" amounts. But there were no addresses, no dates of birth, not even a state listed for any of them. Do they belong to Mick Jagger, the rock star, or to a plumber from New Jersey with the same name? Mick will have to pay to find out.

It's also worth knowing that some of the fee-based firms charge for information that is frequently available for free on some of the databases we've already highlighted, so do the free searches first.

Good luck with your treasure hunt.