Happy pension story?

Pablo7474

This weekend it is apparently “National Pension Tracing Day” and it is claimed there is £27,000,000,000 in lost pension pots out there with the average pot being worth £9,500.

I thought it would be good to hear some stories about people who have found lost pensions and in a time of cost of living crisis to try and encourage people to look? Finding a pot could make a huge difference to people’s lives. 

Remember you never need to pay anyone to find a pension for you, you can do it for free on the tracing service site. 

Anyone got any good news stories? 

Marcon

If you google, you'll find plenty of good news stories about people finding pensions they'd forgotten about or never knew they had!

Link to the free tracing service: https://www.gov.uk/find-pension-contact-details

Pablo7474

And hopefully by setting up this thread more people will look so we will have some more! 

Tommyjw

Give it two years, probably add one or two more to get stable, and the Pensions Dashboard will make this a lot easier 

Pablo7474

A couple of years? That is optimistic 😁

Roxburgh_rose

My partner is hopeless with paperwork. When he moved in I went through everything he had and found paperwork for a couple of old workplace pensions totalling £40k that he knew nothing about. As he seemed so clueless about what pensions may or may not have had, I used the pension tracing service, eventually turning up a DB pension now being handled by an administrator. Not huge, but the £1300 a year he can expect from 65 was a good reward for the time spent 👍

bownyboy

When I was 18 or 19 many years ago I started my first proper job I got convinced to sign up to a pension by Barclays Bank as there was 'free money' to be had. I signed the papers and thought nothing of it since. Never paid anything into it. 

Luckily I kept all the paper work and about 3 years ago I wondered if it was worth anything, I wasn't expecting it to be as I'd never paid in. It took me about a year to find out as it had been transferred to ReAssure. They made me jump through many hoops before they would talk to me (signed proof of identity, signed by witnesses etc).

Eventually I was sent a statement and there was £39k sitting in the account!

Quick as a flash I transferred it out into my Interactive Investor SIPP.  

Silvertabby

Tommyjw said:

Give it two years, probably add one or two more to get stable, and the Pensions Dashboard will make this a lot easier 

Maybe, maybe not.  

I do hope that people aren't expecting to see details of all of their past pensions suddenly appear on this magical dashboard.

In reality, I'm guessing that the pension schemes themselves will need to feed the data onto a central  processing hub (?) in order for it to then be loaded on to the individual boards. One thing for large schemes, such as public sector pensions, but quite another for small schemes. Even if the pension schemes download to the dashboards direct,  the potential for error is still huge. 

And old schemes that had been refunded/transferred won't appear on the dashboard.  In the past, when the media urged people to be sure to claim all of their old pensions, we (LGPS) would have a flurry of phone calls from people who had worked in Local Government in the 1970s/1980s and who now wanted to claim their dues.

If they didn't have a record on our database, then they either took a refund when they left (usually) or transferred to another scheme (rarely) and their paper records had been archived.  No, they didn't do that, and now wanted to claim their money because the chap in the newspaper said 'not to be fobbed off with the "no record" story'.

After digging out the paper records from the basement I would call them back to say that they had been paid a refund of their contributions of £X on xx/xx/xx.  Some remembered this, most  didn't.

The pensions dashboard won't prevent these calls.  And note that whereas the LGPS (at least the one I worked for) kept paper records going back to day one of the scheme (1920s) many smaller pension funds will clear out their archives after a relatively small number of years.

Abbafan1972

What is this pension dashboard that I’ve seen people mention? 

Tommyjw

Abbafan1972 said:

What is this pension dashboard that I’ve seen people mention? 

As far as i am aware there isnt too much "public" facing information about it too yet, so a lot of it is stil lwritten as if its talking to parties involved in setting it up e.g. https://www.thepensionsregulator.gov.uk/en/trustees/contributions-data-and-transfers/dashboards-guidance

The idea is basically it is becoming a requirement for all Occupational schemes (with some caveats) having their data for the Scheme to be in such a way it can link to a dashboard where your average joe can log on, chuck in some personal data, and it will tell him any linked pensiosn hes got lying around. It then gives you the contact details for the company. It will give people a match if certain information all matches, or it will gve them a possible match (e.g. they got married so we hold a dfiferent surname) and tell them the company to contact to verify before pension information is given.

Pension Schemes will be requried to hold specific data and to link to the dashboard otherwise fines will be in some place, this improves the mroe than ever requirement to ensure data quality is good, this includes the ability to provide updated pension valuations (although theres some variation on how accurate this needs to be, certainly for the first two years).

There are plenty of issues to come with it, it wont be perfect, it wont solve everything, but its a huge step in right direction to help peopel find lost pensions.

gm0

Pensions dashboard is niche possibly overoptimistic rolling epic saga. It falls neatly into the political gap between - "Don't want the flack from cancelling" and "Don't think this will work well enough quickly enough to make it a priority for funding".
"Hmmm...don't launch on my watch" is a fairly rational response for a career minded junior minister. 
SPAD - get the SRO to address the ministers' following additional concerns with some extra reviews and checks.  Reshuffle.  Rinse and repeat.  They were chatting about this well before 2010 though it may have had a rebrand or two by now. And I wonder how many SROs

Let's deep dive - a classic public sector intermediation play where the civvies don't want to take responsibility for the data and pool it up centrally as it's bad enough having to do NI and SP and to try and keep that straight.  Not at all unreasonably. 
Highly variable structure and schemas and quality.  Paper, bad scans, lots of strange status coding, linked to rule complexity and other data dirt that should stay scheme local.  And perhaps vague government corporate memory lingers still of the horrors of  the original NIRS load and the later NIRS2 and beyond which exposed the size of previously quiet on paper queues and bad data around national insurance.

Of course during the journey from "no old scheme records loaded" to "everything present and correct" on the web site including all the tiddlers you can look at it during different years and get a completely different answer. 
Or you wait (to launch) until everything is loaded. On a program now already decades in the making.  And that's just - records exist and pointers to where to go.  Accurate for a decent percentage of consumers who rock up in the demographic of people who will want/need to look i.e. 40-60.  No cheating by counting single first jobbers on modern pensions as "success". 
Don't get me started on calculating benefits in a regulated fashion and being able to add them up.

Upthread the "was in", but left and was refunded (but don't remember that particular payslip from 35 years ago) , paper records archived decades ago, because no active membership, not scanned becuase correctly gone - makes the data cleanse *difficult* vs consumer expectations as discussed above. Media encouragement to waste peoples' time looking for the black cat in the darkened room that isn't there.

All of the following are consistent with "nothing is on there for me" even though I remember being employed somewhere way back when.

The dashboard has no record because it has not been loaded yet (so if I come back in two years it may magically appear)

The dashboard has no record because it was paper and I was refunded and it was archived a decade later then destroyed as there was no ongoing relationship or entitlement. It was not needed, nor scanned, isn't in the data set and nobody should be building a web site about it now.  Black cat darkened room.  Not there.

The scheme has not been loaded yet and may not be for some time. A scheme being nearly empty/badly defunct, lacking trustees and in the sticky residue of things that are hard to get sorted for which the economics of bothering are challenging.
Tiny trusts, very few members not transferred on long ago.

Actual data quality issue with records - scanned poorly, mismatching ids, name and address data imperfect etc.


Now I love a bold national sum of the parts scheme as much as anyone.  Several such paid my mortgage. 
This one as currently architected is a bit of a corker.  But at least the stakes are low unlike Universal Credit.

Of course it *could* be made to work - apply money and effort and effective program management. 

But it starts with the *will* to finish and to get to a genuine "minimum viable" with adequate data in it to actually be consumer useful rather than a technical soft launch without the coverage which is a chocolate teapot.

Series 15 of this civil service program management training adventure should have some new plot twists. 

I wonder how many SROs they have had since they started.