It’s time to track down your old pensions

How would you feel if, a few months from retirement, you suddenly unearthed a pension you’d completely forgotten about?

Elated - like that feeling when you find a tenner down the back of the sofa?

Or frustrated, at the missed opportunities for that nest egg that’s just been gathering dust, instead of potentially being part of a larger pension pot?

Across the UK, the number of ‘lost’ pension funds is rising

According to research from the Pensions Policy Institute (PPI), the number has risen by around £7 billion over the last four years to around £26.6 billion. [1]

It’s easy to see why these ‘lost’ pensions are growing. People change jobs more frequently than they used to. It’s thought that in the UK we’re likely to switch jobs at least six times during our career (it’s nearly twice that in the US). The job for life (and with it just the one pension pot) is a thing of the past.

It might be that a plan holder was only in the job for a short time; they might have moved house without notifying the pension provider. Important documents could have been accidentally discarded (a reminder to always hold onto these documents!). Or it could be that a pension pot has changed hands several times between different providers.

In the meantime, the value of that lost pension could have been growing. If you’ve invested early in a final salary scheme for example, even for a couple of years, this could have amassed enough to make a real difference to the annual income you’ll receive in retirement.

To set expectations however, not everyone will be sitting on an undiscovered goldmine. But even if this isn’t the case, whether the amount is relatively trivial or something that could turn a good retirement into a great retirement, it’s still your money.

Let us do the detective work

Tracing your pensions can be a fairly simple affair – there’s a UK government service that helps you find contact details, whether it’s a workplace or personal-pension scheme.

The government has also promised to launch a Pensions Dashboard that it believes will make it easier for people to interact with their state, employer and private pensions (although this project has been subject to several delays).

Sometimes though, tracking down your old schemes requires a bit of sleuthing.

Getting to the bottom of who manages your old pension pot can be an extremely time-consuming process. Sometimes the provider could have changed names (or changed hands) three or four times.

Tracking down membership numbers, contact details and how much you actually have in the scheme needs some good old fashioned detective work. Fortunately, that’s where we’ve been able to step in and help many clients.

One client came to us not so long ago with paperwork from her old Filofax (remember those?!). She’d managed to trace it to four companies but then hit a wall. A bit like the daytime TV show Heir Hunters, we went from pillar to post on her behalf, before we were able to unpick the puzzle and locate her pension.

It took two months, but we found her pension, which was with a company (now closed) called Phoenix Life. The client had set it up in 1997 with £13,000 worth of contributions and it’s now got a transfer value of £157,000! Proof of the benefits of investing early and sticking to a plan.

Again it’s important to note that not everyone will have such good fortune, but even if it’s not an earth-shattering amount, it might still benefit from consolidation into a larger pension.

Merging your pensions helps you reduce your fees and can help you increase your overall pension income.

The bottom line is, you won’t know until you look.

So, what do we need from you to get started?

To track down your pension it’s good to gather any paperwork you might have amassed over the years, and to get a clear chronological picture of your career history.

A list of info including the name of the companies you worked for, their addresses, and the dates you worked there will really help too.

We’ll get our sleuthing hats on and take it from there!

Get in touch to find out more about tracing your lost pensions.

[1] Pensions Policy Institute. Lost Pensions 2022: What’s the scale and impact?