Could You Be One of The One in Twenty People With a Lost Pension?
27th Nov 2023 Managing your Money
2 min read
Vicky Parry from MoneyMagpie is here to help you find out if you are one of the one in twenty people who are sitting on a stash of cash that they have no idea exists.
Believe it or not, there is an estimated £19.4bn worth of pensions
currently lost or forgotten. That’s right, almost 20 billion Great British
Pounds floating in the ether, waiting to be claimed. If you trace your
pensions, you may find that some of it could be yours!
Millions of people are at risk of missing out on a more secure
retirement because of this. Needless to say, there are multiple benefits to
tracing lost and forgotten pensions.
Why not take the time to track down any missing pension pots and
investigate your personal finances?
New research suggests that as many as 1 in 20 people may have lost or
forgotten a pension.
It’s a startling statistic – especially when you consider that the
average ‘lost’ pension amounts to a whopping £9,500. A cash injection like that
is something we could all do with in the current economic climate.
Duncan Stevens from a free pension tracing service called Gretel says
that “We estimate there is £78 billion sitting in dormant accounts, with the
biggest pot being in unclaimed pensions. Worryingly, a staggering amount of
this - potentially as much as £15bn - belongs to people who are no longer with
us.
Due to the vast number of pension schemes in existence and the
requirement to remember key details about the lost relative, such as their
employment history, people often find it far more difficult to track down old
pensions in these circumstances. Helping people look for accounts belonging to
lost relatives is therefore an important part of our mission to get the
billions of pounds of dormant, lost and unclaimed money back into the hands of
those to whom it belongs. In removing the need for much of this additional
- One way is to do it manually yourself, using the Government’s Pension Tracing Service (https://www.gov.uk/find-pension-contact-details), putting in any information you have about former employers and former addresses, contacting HMRC and the Pension Protection Fund (https://www.ppf.co.uk/schemes/index) if necessary.
- Another is to put your address and date of birth (or those of your deceased relative) into Gretel.co.uk and let them or one of the other schemes search for you for free.
Read more: Your pension explained
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Image by Nattanan Kanchanaprat from Pixabay
