'You don’t have to save your enthusiasm for a single day either, because tracking down a pension is the kind of enormously rewarding activity that could repay tens of thousands of pounds whenever you get stuck in'
We need to remember every one of them whenever we move house, and contact them to change our address. This isn’t always at the top of the to-do list: according to the Association of British Insurers, only one in 25 people think to let their pension provider know when they move house. So it’s easy to see how we have lost track of 2.8m pension pots, worth a total of £26.6bn, according to the Pensions Policy Institute.
For workplace pensions, if there’s nothing forthcoming, try to wrack your brain for the names of your former employers. Get together everything you can – ideally the name of the company, their address, or any other contact details. You can try searching on the Companies House website to see if their details are on there. Then get in touch and ask about the pension scheme they offered when you were there, and who the pension company or administrators were.
In some cases, there will be nothing to find. Depending on the rules in place at the time, you may not have joined the scheme – before the advent of automatic enrolment you had to make an active choice to join.Even if you have a pension certificate, it may not mean you have a pension. If, for example, you left an employer before 1975, you may have had pension contributions refunded.
If you end up with more than one pension, you’ll need to keep an eye on all of them, so add it to your to-do list when you move house. It’s also worth getting post redirected for a full year, so that annual statements of any pensions you have forgotten will make their way to you and remind you to change your address.Tracking down a pension isn’t always straightforward, and if your employer no longer exists it can be positively frustrating.