Tracing a Pension Member in Three Easy Steps

An estimated £400million of pensions are unclaimed in the United Kingdom. Are you or your loved ones missing out?

The first thing that you have to do is get your finances in order when readying yourself for retirement. If you’ve only worked one job your entire life, this might not be all that difficult – your finances and associated admin are likely to be straightforward. However, if you’ve chopped and changed a few jobs and worked for different companies you may have to do a bit of investigation work to ensure you’re not missing out. If you had additional personal pension plans that you have been paying into over the years they will also need tracking down. Here’s how to trace a pension for yourself or a loved one.

How Can You Trace a Pension?

Each pension plan that you’ve been a member of, regardless of whether it was a personal plan or a workplace pension, is required to send you a yearly statement. Sometimes, a change of address or other circumstances leads to you no longer receiving those statements and they can often get forgotten. If this is the case, you’ll need to follow a few easy steps in order to track down your pension. It is worth noting that prevention is better than cure, so if you’re reading this and have recently changed address without telling your pension provider/s it’s a good idea to let them know of the changes as soon as possible.

Step #1: Contact the Pension Provider

The first step to finding a missing pension is to check with the company or provider of the pension. This could be a business or corporation that you or the pension holder worked for. Or, it could be a provider who supplied a personal pension plan. Whichever is the case, if you know the name of the provider or company, you can write to them or email them asking for clarification about the pension. If the company is still in business, they should be able to provide you with further information about the pension plan. If the company is no longer trading, your pension could still be protected and you can still track it down. 

Step #2: Use a Free Pension Tracing Service

The government provides a helpful pension tracing service that can help you track down missing pensions. All you need to do is visit their website, fill in some information, and answer a few questions, and you can automatically track pensions. There’s also a separate search for Welsh citizens. However, the service isn’t 100% fool-proof. Certain factors, such as when you worked for an employer and whether they are still in operation, can affect whether you receive the information that you are looking for. If the search doesn’t turn up positive results, you may have to dig a little deeper (move on to step 3).

Step #3: Enlist the Help of a Professional Pension Tracer

If you aren’t successful in tracing a pension through a company, provider, or by using the government search service, there may still be hope. A professional tracing service may be able to help you track down the records that you are looking for, and provide further hope of claiming a lost pension.

Often, pension holders, or the beneficiaries of deceased pension holders, do not realise that they are missing out on unclaimed funds. This is so common, in fact, that experts estimate that there are more than  £400 million in unclaimed pensions in the United Kingdom. If you suspect that you or a loved one may have an unclaimed pension, you may want to begin a search today to see if you are missing out on money that belongs to you.

Writer’s Bio: Lewis Murawski is the Marketing Director at Kahootz Media. He has been ranking websites on the first page of Google for more than 10 years. Connect with Lewis on LinkedIn.