How will you spend the extra hour when the clocks go back this weekend? Sleeping perhaps? Possibly not thinking about pensions…but here’s why you should.

It is National Pension Tracing Day on 31 October, a new initiative launched by Punter Southall Aspire, which is backed by leading pension providers including Scottish Widows, Aegon, Legal and General and Standard Life.

The clever guys behind this campaign are encouraging people to use the extra hour when the clocks go back to go on a treasure hunt and start tracing mislaid or lost pensions.

There’s a staggering £19.4 billion in lost pensions out there. This is around 1.6 million pension pots, with the average lost pension pot being worth around £13,000.  An estimated 1 in 30 may have lost their pensions.

You may ask why someone would lose or forget a pension. Well, a big factor is people changing jobs – on average 11 times during their careers – and moving house, typically eight times, but forgetting to tell their pension company their new contact details.

Also, for many of those that have DB pensions with different employers, some were non-contributory (unlike DC pensions today) so you may not have even known your employer was paying into a scheme for you, especially if this was many years ago.

This isn’t your fault… companies were just not as sophisticated decades ago at pension governance, administration, and communication and often people were unaware they even had a pension.

However, the fantastic news is it’s not too late to find these lost pension pots… and what’s more it’s free and easy to do!  Punter Southall Aspire has launched an online resource centre that shows you exactly how to go about this.

Easy to follow steps include listing all old employers, searching your paperwork, checking each pension pot to ensure contact details are correct and researching any gaps in your pension history.

Be aware that some organisations may have changed names. You can check names and contact details on the Government’s pension tracing service.

So don’t let National Pension Tracing Day pass you by, why not dedicate an hour or so to finding out if you are one of the thousands that has lost or forgotten a pension. Happy hunting!

At Stoneport Pensions we specialise in helping small final salary schemes achieve excellent levels of administration and governance, which helps to ensure that people will also know they have a pension so hopefully no one need lose a pension again!

If you’re interested in how Stoneport Pensions can help you manage your pension scheme better, please get in touch. We’re Stronger Together!