The money was already mine. It just took four agencies — and a lot of patience and paperwork — to get it back.

A few months ago I went looking for one forgotten account. I found four. Together they added up to about €3,500 — a little over $4,000 — sitting in my own name, that no one was ever going to hand back on their own.

What I actually found

None of it was exotic. It was the most ordinary money in the world:

• A savings account an uncle opened for me when I was bornasleep 30 years
• An account I forgot to close when I switched banksdormant 6 years
• A tax refund that bounced to a bank account I'd already closedstuck 21 years
• An apartment deposit I never got backwaiting 7 years

Four pieces of my own life I'd lost track of by simply moving, switching banks, and getting on with things. None of these institutions had any real reason to find me. So they didn't.

The shock

My first feeling wasn't joy. It was how was I supposed to know this existed?

No letter. No email. No notification. Money that was clearly mine had been sitting in silence for up to three decades — and the only reason I found it was that I went digging. It made me wonder how much everyone else is leaving behind without ever knowing it. The answer, it turns out, is billions.

The wall

Finding the money was step one. Getting it back was four completely different fights. Every account lived in a different place, with its own forms, its own proof, its own rules:

• The state deposits-and-consignments fund held the oldest account and the tax refund. Reliable, but slow — even the "fast" claim took two months.
• The deposit-guarantee body (a semi-private state outfit) handled the apartment deposit: a genuine obstacle course — different file, different evidence, endless back-and-forth.
• One account was still at the bank directly, because it hadn't been dormant long enough to be transferred to the state fund yet. Fastest to claim — and the hardest to even locate.

Different information, different paperwork, different dead ends, for the same simple thing: money I'd already earned. The money was never hidden. The process was the obstacle — built to be survived, not used. Most people give up long before the check arrives.

So I built it for myself

I'm a builder, so I did what I do: I treated the maze as a problem to map. I tracked which documents each body wanted, where every claim stalled, and which steps were just wasted time. I got all four back. And the messy toolkit I'd assembled for myself turned out to be the thing I wished had existed on day one.

Why I'm sharing it

I lived this in France — but it's the exact same maze in the United States, just split across 50 different states, dozens of federal agencies, and their own legacy portals. Same dormant accounts, same forgotten refunds, same deposits. Same wall.

And if it was this hard for me — someone who builds software for a living — it's impossible for the people who need that money most. The single parent who moved three times. The family settling a parent's estate. Anyone who never had the time, the patience, or the legal vocabulary to fight a government portal on a Tuesday night.

So I'm turning the tool I built for myself into Reclaimd — so anyone can recover what's theirs without fighting the bureaucracy alone. We're going slow on purpose: filing the first claims by hand, getting them right, and turning every dead end into automation that works for the next person.

If money like this is sitting in your name, I'd rather you hear it from us than find out by luck, thirty years late.

— Romain Tribout, founder of Reclaimd (Vef invest SAS)