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This question strikes us as a great example of how a little bit of information can sometimes be more misleading than no information at all. To the best of our knowledge, neither the federal nor the state government of Alaska pays people to move to the "Last Frontier." On the other hand, qualifying residents of Alaska do receive an annual payment from the state, known as the Permanent Fund Dividend. The Permanent Fund was established by the state of Alaska in 1976 to protect, reinvest, and grow the revenues generated by North Slope oil revenues and the Trans-Alaska pipeline. Managed as a private corporation independent of the state government, part of the fund revenues are distributed annually to
every qualifying 12-month resident of the state. This has injected over 8 billion dollars into the incomes of individual Alaskans over nearly 20 years. The last time we looked, the fund's net worth was over 27 billion dollars. Wow. How did we go about finding all this information? Well, it wasn't easy. We constructed a variety of searchs and tried them on an assortment of search engines to no avail. We tried "alaska resident free money" and "alaska resident payment," but the results that turned up related to state university tuition payments and hunting and fishing permits. We decided to test the Yahoo! Directory to see if we could browse our way to an answer at an official state government resource. We figured if the state was shelling out money, there was bound to be a web page
about it; we just didn't know what it would be called. Beginning on the front page, we clicked our way from "Government" to "U.S. Government" to "State Government," then we clicked on "Alaska." We browsed the listings for different governmental departments and gambled on the Department of Revenue category. Aha! The descriptive comment for the Permanent Fund Dividend Division site suggested that we were right on track for the information you were seeking. Remember, you need to spend 12 months in Alaska in order to qualify for the dividend -- that's about 8
months of winter, more or less, before the pay-off. Then again, you can stock up on a lot of cold-weather gear for $1749 (the amount of the 1999 dividend check).
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