20 April 2023 , 07:23
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Martin Lewis has urged savers to check for lost pensions after one man discovered a staggering £121,000 sitting in forgotten pots.
The MoneySavingExpert.com founder warned others they may be missing out on significant sums of cash.
The average worker has around 11 jobs over the course of their career, which means many end up with multiple small pensions.
It can be easy to lose track of your pensions - in fact, Martin explained how there is currently £27billion sitting in lost pots.
Writing in the latest MSE email, Martin said: "Are you one of those with £10,000s hidden?
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"After watching one of my TV shows on lost pensions, Rob got in touch to say he'd checked the free Pension Tracing Service, after it'd triggered a memory of signing up to a long forgotten pension in his first job 30 years ago.
"This helped him locate his old provider, and he found he'd paid in £24,500, and it was now worth £97,000.
"Gobsmacked, he then checked through his box of old papers, and found another pension from the 1990s he'd paid £600 into, traced it, and was shocked to find it was now worth £24,000."
Martin added: "This is my long way of saying... it's worth a check."
The Pension Tracing Service is a free tool that helps you find any pension pots you may have lost track of.
This service won’t tell you whether you have a pension, or what its value is - but it lets you search by employer, and then find pension schemes linked to them.
This should then help you track down the relevant contact information, so you can get in touch with the pension provider yourself.
You can also use the Pension Tracing Service to find contact details for someone else’s scheme if you have their permission.
For example, if a close relative has died without taking their pension, you may be eligible to their pension cash.
You should check their paperwork to see if they had any personal or workplace pension schemes in place.
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The Pension Tracing Service can only help you find private and workplace pensions - not your state pension.
There are over 200,000 pension schemes in the UK.
You can find out more about how to find lost money here.
If you still have old paperwork from a pension scheme, you can just contact the company directly without using the Pension Tracing Service.