Thousands of Brits have forgotten about their savings, pensions, insurance policies and investments (Image: Getty)
In the Downes/Soames household, my husband and I have a lot of conversations about money.
It’s normally along the lines of what is due and when, accompanied by a nodding or — in the case of a surprise £600 quarterly bill from the water company last month — a definite shaking of heads.
Last night while watching Bad Sisters we got to talking about pensions, as you do.
To be fair, it’s s conversation that has proven lucrative in the past; a few months ago my husband tracked down a pension from his time at a global multi-national company after one of our chats.
It was a nice sum, but did it take some work to find, and was annoying especially since he only left the company two years ago on good terms to do a Phd in AI and psychology.
So I reminded my husband about the other pension he needed to chase up, the one at the company he worked for before that. This one is and was based in Cambridge, and my husband worked there 2012 to 2016.
He told me that he’d been chasing this pension for several months. The company had been sold and he’d called the new owner several times. He was finally given details of people to email about the pension but he had had not heard anything back for over a month.
My first reaction, after pausing the scene where Blainaid is giving it her all in a hockey match was to exclaim: FGS! Another ‘lost’ pension.
I’ve been writing for this paper and for others about for years.
£64bn is a lot of money but most of it is in the form of ‘small pots’ – considered small amounts of £30,000 or under.
Gretel – a free money tracing service (bless them) estimates that this cash is spread around 2.8 million pensions – adding up to the £64bn, or an average of £23,125 each pot.
Now, call me cynical but those small pots are quite expensive for the pension companies to adminster, and I’m wondering if that is why nobody really seems that interested in reuniting the cash with its owners
There’s another frustration with all this, because there had been a plan to solve the causes of the small pots issue.
Back in July 2023 was going to try and do something which would give us all our own pension pot, which we could take to each employer everytime we move jobs.
But plans to consolidate these pots have been ditched by the Labour government, leaving all that cash — still lying unloved and lost.
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Pension companies do struggle with paperwork. I know. I’ve written about pensions since 1996 and layer upon layer of legislation has made our pension system a complete and utter mess. Furbs or segmented section 32s anyone? Thought not!
Last year I wrote a piece for FTAdviser
So if the small pots issue doesn’t make your blood boil then that surely will. Pensions are not cheap either, we pay for them — the savers — for admin and fund management fees. There are other ‘fees’ too.
There is another thing as there always is. Because not all of these are small pots, some of these are missing pensions worth six figures. There are even missing annuities and endowments.
I’m in the process of trying to find the pension of fellow journalist who has an estimated pension pot of over £100,000 — and she cannot find it. Gallingly her colleagues are all starting to enjoy theirs.
As Generation X nears its retirement there are going to be a lot of people coming into their late 40s and early 50s and older wondering where their hard-earned cash is.
As one friend, who is in her mid-50s pointed out “we’ve worked like dogs, many of us not in such great pensions as our parents and you would hope that while we we busting ourselves someone would keep an eye on our pensions.”
One thing I do hope is that my children — thanks to technlogical advances and the extension of auto enrolment — manage to keep their on the prize, that is their juicy retirement fund. Because no one else — it seems — is.