Thousands of Brits find lost savings worth £31k EACH, with one nabbing huge pot of £3.2m – how to find yours

THOUSANDS of Brits have managed to track down lost savings in the first half of this year. Roughly £2.5billion worth of lost and unclaimed financial assets was returned to savers by firms including JP Morgan and Standard Life. This included pensions, investments, savings and financial protection. The cash was returned to savers through the Billions 4 Millions scheme launched by lost asset finder Gretel. Sign up for the Money newsletter Thank you! On average, customers were reconnected with pots worth £31,647. But the biggest recovery was a protection policy worth a massive £3.2million. Lost pensions accounted for 80% of the number of claims, but just 38% of the overall value. Meanwhile insurance and protection made up 12% of claims but roughly 60% of the total value. Gretel estimates roughly £89billion is sitting in forgotten or unclaimed accounts. It’s easy to lose track of your finances if you move house, change your name or if paperwork is misplaced. Most read in Money Accounts are usually declared dormant when banks fail to track the holders down at their last known address. You can also easily lose track of one of your pension pots when you switch jobs or if your provider closes down. A huge £31.1billion worth of retirement savings is thought to be sitting unclaimed, according to the Pensions Policy Institute. Financial providers participating in the Billions 4 Millions scheme include Aviva, Phoenix Group, Foresters Financial, JP Morgan Asset Management, Janus Henderson Investors and Rathbones. How to track down a lost pension pot You can track down your old pensions using the Government’s Pension Tracing Service Credit: PA First gather all the pension documentation you have, such as paper work or online documents or emails. You should receive this when you first sign up for a workplace pension. Pension providers tend to send annual statements by post which you can use to find any crucial contact details too. If, once trawling through your paperwork, you see any pension providers you don’t recognise, you can get in touch with them. Ask if they have any information about your pension pot and its value and they should be able to help. If you can’t find the right paperwork, or you can’t remember who an old pension was with, you can speak to the HR department at your former employer. Contact them to see if they can help you find out which pension provider administered your workplace scheme. If you can’t get in touch with a previous employer, or you are trying to hunt down a private pension, you can use the Government’s online Pension Tracing Service. The service is free to use, but only tells you the contact details of your pension provider and doesn’t let you combine and manage pots like Penny. Pension firm AJ Bell also has a service to locate old pensions and lets you combine them into one pot. It takes around four to six weeks to find your pensions. It is free to use AJ Bell’s pension tracing service, but it will charge you to manage your single pot – depending on what pension you take up, you are charged an up to 0.6% fee. Once you have found your old pensions, it may be worth consolidating them into one place so you can keep track of them more easily in future. Comment now