Somewhere right now, a state treasurer's office is holding money that belonged to a person who is dead. Not a fortune, usually. A payout balance from a payment processor. A security deposit. A refund that bounced off a closed card. The people who loved that person have no idea it exists, and they are not going to go looking, because you cannot search for something you have never heard of. Nobody stole it. Nobody hid it. It is simply sitting in the gap between what one person knew and what they wrote down, and the gap is quiet enough that it can last forever.

If you run a business by yourself, you have more of these accounts than almost anyone. That is not a criticism. It is the shape of the job.

The safety net you've never heard of

Every US state has an unclaimed property law. The idea is old and reasonable: when a bank, a brokerage, an insurer, a utility, or a company holding customer balances loses contact with the owner of some money for long enough, it cannot keep that money for itself. After a dormancy period, usually somewhere between one and five years depending on the state and the type of property, the holder is required to turn it over to the state. The state becomes a custodian. It does not spend the money as its own. It holds it, in most states indefinitely, for whoever shows up with proof that it is theirs. Heirs can claim on behalf of someone who has died, usually with a death certificate and documents showing they are entitled to the estate.

This process is called escheatment, and it is quietly enormous. State programs hold billions of dollars in aggregate, and the administrators' own association runs a free national search site precisely because so much of it never gets claimed. For an ordinary estate, it is a genuine backstop. If your executor forgets a savings account, the bank will eventually hand the balance to the state, and years later someone can find it by typing your name into a search box.

Here is the uncomfortable part: that backstop was designed for a world where a person's money lived in a handful of institutions with physical mailing addresses. It was not designed for you.

Where the net has holes

Walk through a solo founder's actual balance sheet and watch what the safety net catches and what falls straight through.

Your payment processor balance? Possibly caught, eventually, if the processor is a compliant holder and your executor one day searches the right state. Your business checking account? Caught, after years of dormancy. Your brokerage account? Caught. So far so good.

Now the rest. The domain registrar credit and the prepaid year of hosting do not escheat. They expire. The affiliate earnings below a payout threshold sit in a dashboard until the account is closed for inactivity. The ad network revenue that only pays once you hit a minimum never hits it. The marketplace balance governed by terms of service you clicked through in 2021. The invoice you sent the week before you died, which the client will happily never pay if nobody follows up. The deposit with a vendor. The prepaid annual software you could have refunded. The crypto in a wallet whose seed phrase is in your head. None of this is anybody's fault, and none of it has a treasurer's office waiting at the other end.

And even the money the net does catch comes with two costs. The first is time. Dormancy periods are measured in years, which is exactly the window when your family most needs cash. The second is knowledge. The state will hold your money forever, but it will not call anyone. Someone has to know to look, know which states to search (the holder's state and your state can differ), and know the business name as well as yours, because a balance held under your LLC does not surface when your sister types in your first and last name.

The net, in other words, catches money that is known and slow. It does not catch money that is unknown and fast, which is most of a founder's money.

The curse of knowledge, and why you never made the list

So why hasn't the list been written? It is not laziness. There is a well-documented reason, and it has a name.

In 1990, a Stanford psychology graduate student named Elizabeth Newton ran a simple experiment. She asked people to tap out the rhythm of a well-known song on a table while a listener tried to name it. Before they started, tappers predicted the listener would get it about half the time. In reality, listeners identified the song fewer than three times in a hundred. The tappers could hear the whole melody in their heads as they tapped. The listeners heard knocking.

Economists Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein, and Martin Weber had named this effect a year earlier: the curse of knowledge. Once you know something, you lose the ability to accurately imagine not knowing it. You do not just forget what ignorance felt like. You systematically underestimate how much the other person is missing.

Every solo founder is a tapper. You know that the revenue comes through two processors because one handles EU VAT better. You know the side project pays out through a different platform. You know the business bank is the online one, not the one with the branch. You know which of your four email addresses the invoices go to. To you this is not a list. It is a melody you have been humming for years. From the outside it is knocking. When you picture your partner or your sibling sitting at your desk after the funeral, the curse of knowledge quietly fills in all the gaps for them, and the picture looks manageable. It is not manageable. It is a room full of drawers, and they do not know which ones have money in them.

This is why "my spouse basically knows where everything is" is the most common sentence in estate planning and the least true. Your spouse knows the melody you have played in front of them. They do not know the accounts you opened at 11pm to test an idea that turned into a steady four hundred dollars a month.

What an asset map is, and what it isn't

The fix is not a password vault, though you probably want one of those too. Passwords answer "how do I get in." The problem here is one step earlier: "what exists, and where." That is an asset map, and it is deliberately boring.

For every place money lives or flows, it records four things. What the account is, in plain language. Who holds it (the institution, not the URL). Roughly what is in it or passes through it. And the one fact that unlocks the rest: which business entity or which of your names it is under. Not the balance to the penny. Not the password. Just enough that a stranger, grieving and in a hurry, could pick up the phone and say "I'm calling about an account held by this company, the owner has died" and be talking to the right place.

The map's value comes from its edges, not its center. Your family will find the main bank account without help. The map exists for the fourth processor, the deposit, the unpaid invoice, the platform balance. It exists for everything that the curse of knowledge told you was obvious.

Your next moves

  • Search for yourself today. Go to the free national unclaimed property search run by the state administrators' association, and your own state's site, and type in your name and every business name you have ever used. If something is already sitting there while you are alive, that tells you how leaky your own tracking is.
  • Open a blank document and list every place money comes in or sits. Set a timer for twenty minutes. Processors, banks, brokerages, marketplaces, ad and affiliate networks, prepaid vendors, deposits, outstanding invoices, wallets. Do not look anything up yet. The goal is a first draft of what you believe exists.
  • Then audit the draft against your inbox. Search your email for "payout," "deposit," "statement," and "balance" over the last twelve months. Every sender you did not list is a drawer your family would never have opened. Add it.
  • Tag each line with the entity name and the home state of the holder. This is the detail that makes an unclaimed property search actually work years later, and it takes thirty seconds per line.
  • Put the map where your executor will look first, and tell them it exists. A document nobody knows about has the same curse as the accounts it describes. Say the sentence out loud to one person: "There is a list of every account. It is here."

Where Heirloom fits

Everything above works with a text file and a drawer. Where it gets hard is keeping it true. You will open a new account next quarter, close another, change the payout bank, and the list will drift quietly out of date the way lists do. Heirloom was built for exactly this: a vault for solo founders that holds the asset map alongside the handoff instructions and beneficiaries, so the inventory of what exists stays beside the instructions for what to do with it, and the people you name actually receive it. If you have ever thought "they basically know where everything is," that sentence is the reason to take a look at https://heirloom.lumenlabs.works.