I have a terrible habit of putting my keys, wallet and/or phone down and instantly forgetting where I put them. This results in me leaving home, not with a ‘goodbye’, but a stressed shout of “have you seen my *insert missing item*?”

This self-made game of hide-and-seek with my possessions can be frustrating (for me and those I live with) but it is harder to quantify the impact that it actually has on me, harder still to assign a monetary value to all of the time wasted searching for my possessions.

However, you could be one of 1.6 million Britons who have misplaced something that could have a very real impact, with a financial price tag to boot. This is the estimated amount of pension policies in the U.K., worth a staggering £19.4 billion, that the Association of British Insurers (ABI) believe are ‘lost’.

The ABI gives the main reason these policies become lost as house moves by the policy owner, where the administrators of your old pension policies can no longer find you and remind you of your entitlement.

This firmly puts the onus of remembering and looking after these old policies directly on you.

A good exercise I would encourage everyone to do is to make a list of all your old employers. Noting that if you were part of a company that was involved in a buy-out from another company, include both employers in your list, such as:

Then write down beside each Employer who the pension provider was for that employment:

Any gaps? Or any that you might have lost sight of?

Then go to the Government’s Find Pension Contacts website (link at the bottom of this article). It will ask you a series of basic questions and take you through to a screen where you can search by your old employers’ name and get the name and contact details of the current pension administrators.

The whole exercise will take you less than half an hour, and on average each ‘lost’ pension policy is worth £12,125 – this seems a far better use of time than the half an hour I will inevitably spend looking for my various possessions this week.

Website – https://www.findpensioncontacts.service.gov.uk/

Jon Young
Chartered Financial Planner – WealthFlow
Jon.Young@wealthflow.com

This article is distributed for educational purposes and should not be considered investment advice or an offer of any product for sale. This article contains the opinions of the author but not necessarily the Firm and does not represent a recommendation of any particular security, strategy or investment product. Information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable but is not guaranteed. Past performance is not indicative of future results and no representation is made that the stated results will be replicated. Errors and omissions excepted.

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WealthFlow Group Ltd. Registered in Scotland No SC635011. Registered Office: 10 Charlotte Square, Edinburgh EH2 4DR.

Head Office & Consulting Rooms: 10 Charlotte Square, Edinburgh EH2 4DR.

Mail correspondence to our Central Scotland Admin Hub: WealthFlow Group Limited, PO Box 14947, Grangemouth FK3 3AU.

WealthFlow Group Ltd is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.

The guidance/advice contained in this website is subject to the UK regulatory regime and is therefore restricted to consumers based in the UK.

For your protection, unresolved complaints can be referred to the Financial Ombudsman Service.

To contact the Financial Ombudsman Service, please visit www.financial-ombudsman.org.uk.

WealthFlow Group Ltd. Registered in Scotland No SC635011. Registered Office: 10 Charlotte Square, Edinburgh EH2 4DR.