Sunday 30 October, is National Pension Tracing Day, with new data revealing just how many UK adults have unclaimed pension pots that could be worth tens of thousands of pounds.
Financial wellbeing platform Mintago offers a pension hunting service for its users – employees of organisations that partner with Mintago – and independent financial advisors (IFAs). Based on a sample of 1,500 pension hunts carried out on its platform, the company discovered that 78% of people did indeed have a lost pension pot with an employer or former employer.
On average, an individual has 2.5 missing pensions, with each pot having an average value of £9,500, meaning that the amount tracked down by a typical user came to approximately £24,000.
To date, Mintago has helped users and IFAs trace more than £11 million worth of lost pensions for people across the UK.
These are the most common pension providers with whom people had lost pensions:
- Nest
- People’s Pension
- Scottish Widows
- Aviva
- Legal & General
It is estimated that there are £20 billion of lost pensions sitting unclaimed in the UK alone. National Pension Tracing Day is an awareness day set up to make people aware of pensions they might have forgotten about, helping and encouraging Britons to claim their money and spread the word to family, friends and colleagues.
Chieu Cao, CEO of Mintago, said: “There is an astonishing number of pensions that people are either unaware of, or suspect they have accrued along the way but simply do not know how to find. Millions of people are sat on thousands of pounds of pensions, just waiting to be found.
“In the midst of a harsh, worsening cost-of-living crisis, tracking down a missing pension could provide a huge boost to someone’s financial future. We must raise awareness of this topic, not just the fact that so many people have undiscovered pensions, but how they can find them.
“Employers and IFAs have a key role to play. They can be that missing link, engaging employees and clients with their lost pensions and then helping them find these pots of gold. They can do this by working with platforms like Mintago, which make the process quick and easy.”