Rotimi Merriman-Johnson and Laura Ann-Moore on Finding Your Lost UK Pension

This transcript is auto-generated and lightly edited for readability, it may contain errors.

[0:18] Rotimi: There’s several billion pounds worth of lost pension money. It’s thirty-one billion. Thirty-one billion. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

[0:25] Sammie: Mad.

[0:26] Rotimi: I yeah, last start I saw was 19, but it’s it’s it’s growing all the time, and it’s a consequence of how many jobs the average person has. So we have auto enrollment, which means that if you work for a company you’re aged over 22 and earn more than 10,000 pounds a year, they legally have to pay into a pension for you, you pay in as well, and then you get uh tax relief from the government. But the average person has between 11 and 12 jobs over the course of their life, and I can imagine that will increase as well. Um, as we said um in the other um question answer as well, uh life expectancy is going up, pension age is going up, so more people will be working in more jobs for longer. Um, so that’s great for people saving into pensions, but could lead you to have lots of different pots. Even though you might not be paying into a pension pot anymore, it’s still there. You know, it’s uh it’s like similar to a bank account, it’s just an account that’s in your name. And also um it doesn’t actually take that much for it to be considered lost. I mean, if you move house and you don’t tell your pension provider, then that you know that’s counted as lost. So um it’s quite a common thing. In terms of what you can do with it, you can do um you can use the government’s pension tracing service, and if you just Google that, it is um a page on the gov.uk website that lets you put in the name of where you used to work, and then it will show you the scheme name and the number, but then you have to call it up yourself. There are also various pension platforms that offer consolidation services as part of their sign-up process to get you to save your pension with them, or you can so you can try that. I think another useful thing is you can go back through your emails. If you’ve forgotten where you worked, just go back through your emails and see. You know, normally they’ll send you the contract or or something at least, and um you can use that to kind of figure out where you worked and where your pension used to be. But it’s it’s it’s a tricky problem for sure.

[2:31] Sammie: Yeah. I had nine grand when I found mine and I was like pretty shocked that I didn’t expect it to be that. I think I calculated it to be about five and was like, whoa, cool. Like there was a couple that I didn’t remember from like little sales jobs that I had, and I was like, oh yeah, like I worked there for a year when I was 22, like I just didn’t even think about it.

[2:51] Rotimi: Yeah. Um what what I’ve done with my pensions, because I’ve I’ve not worked in that many companies, is whenever I have like a main pension pot, and then whenever whenever I would leave the company, I would do a man a pension transfer manually from the job I was leaving to that main pension pot, which was the first pension I I ever had. Um and those pension transfers went through. But unlike something like this um the current account switch service, um, there is no, I only learned this recently, there’s no set time frame on which a pension transfer needs to be executed. So there are currently various groups at the moment trying to um like lobby for like a like a dedicated pension transfer service. But we can expect this conversation to to continue as time goes on.

[3:39] Sammie: 100%. Um we had David Henderson from Penny on and they were talking about like um the government working on pensions dashboards so you can actually see where things are and straight away and actually have like log in and it’s there and you can go and access them and it’ll tell you the provider and exactly how much is there, which is amazing. Yeah. Um, which is like I think it’s brilliant. And then he was saying the development of that is like commercial platforms, which will be much more widely used. Yeah. That’s been quite heavy in in Sweden and Norway, I believe, and uh Scandinavian countries uh in general, they’ve been doing this and it’s worked. And I think that’s such a cool thing because you just log in and be like, I’m rich! I got some money.

[4:20] Rotimi: So it’s like, yeah, auto-enrolment. Pre-auto-enrolment, pension adoption rates were fairly low. Then with auto-enrolment, we now latest data 88% of um employees contribute to workplace pensions, so it’s gone up, but then it’s created the new problem of yes, there are high percentages of people saving, but it’s happening in the background and they don’t know. So just one of those things where like you solve a problem, but then like a hydra, it creates like three more. Yeah. Yeah.

[4:48] Sammie: Yeah.

[4:48] Sammie: Well, they’ll get there eventually. I think they’ve they’re working on it, which is great to see. Anything to add there, Laura, at all?

[4:54] Laura: Not really, actually. I think you literally covered everything. I’ve got two pensions. I only had one basically job before I did before I started my business. It was like one job that I had when I was 19. And then the only reason why I ended up with a second pension is because that business closed down. But I went with the boss and we ended up in working basically together again. Um, so that like I’ve literally got two pensions with not loads in it. So I didn’t really need to do anything with it. But I get asked all the time about pension consolidation. Yeah. And like I think it, I guess what I will say is it’s one of those tasks that I think gets put on people’s lists and people really like um what’s the word? Like the opposite of excited. Like then they couldn’t think of anything worse. So it just gets pushed along and it pushed along. People are like, oh, I’ve got to sort of my pensions out. And it’s like, it probably is quite long, especially when you’ve got to call them up and you’ve got up. I had a friend do it recently, and he was like, you know what? It actually wasn’t too like as hard as I thought it was gonna be. Um but I would say is if you are in that position where you want to consolidate your pensions, each time you have a money day every month, just try and do one of them, like break it down into smaller tasks. If you don’t want to go through a service where um a company or a brand is doing it for you and you move everything there and you just want to look into it yourself, just task yourself with like one calling one, you know, one company each money day or something so that you can get through it without feeling like you’ve got to dedicate like three days of your life to it.

[6:22] Sammie: Yeah, it did take me a while. It was a good few hours of work, and then uh as well with Nest, which was an absolute ball ache. They send you a letter in the post, you then have to like fill out the form, send it back to them in the post, they then send you back the number, then you put that through, then that takes three weeks. I was just like, oh my god, surely that need this needs. This is one of those things you’re like, just get it online, let me put a number in and let me move my money out, like you can in a bank. But it was a quite a long process. Some were a lot quicker. It was literally a phone call, it’s like, okay, where are you moving it? Here’s your number, but I’m done. But some quite archaic. Um but hopefully Nest have changed that. Uh now not calling them out at all. Um the only thing with that as well, I would add, is um it can pay off to consolidate and uh because of the default plans, um, default plans might not be as suitable for you. So we did a calculation. So my mum found £65,000 in lost pensions.

[7:28] Laura: Love.

[7:29] Sammie: Um, she did quite good out of it. It was literally from when she was working in her 20s, and it’s grow it grew massively. Um, but it was sat in a default plan, and we worked out if even if it was on a slightly more balanced plan, she would have had uh so from the 65,000 pounds, she would have had just under 110,000. Wow. So that’s one tall small switch. But basically throughout her like key years, in her late 20s to early 50s, she’s now in her early 60s, like would have been in about 45 grand. Wow. So it’s quite a lot of money. Um so I think if you are happier with it being in a slightly more balanced or even more adventurous approach, especially in your key compounding years, it may be beneficial for you to sort it out and get that money moving in a direction that’s a little bit more beneficial. Do you know much about default plans as you tell sure?

[8:23] Rotimi: Yeah, yeah, they it’s almost the onus is put on the pension saver. So it’s like it goes into the default plan. But yeah, you might want to take a more um what’s sometimes called risky or adventurous approach, which essentially means that more of your pension savings are in um equities, so stocks and shares than in than in bonds or or cash. You may have ethical considerations around your pension savings as well, which wouldn’t be um which wouldn’t be fulfilled by a default plan. You may want to um or you may have certain like religious requirements, um like an ESG or Sharia fund, yeah. Exactly. So yeah, just your your pension savings, it’s your it’s your money that you’re paying into every month via an automatic process. And so it’s easy to not think about it. But it is yours. Um we’re all living and working longer than ever before. Most of the people listening to this will probably spend a third of their life retired. Um so it’s yeah, it’s worth it’s worth looking at. And um completely agree with what Laura says. If you have lots of pots, then break it down, maybe say, you know, you’ll make one call a week or one call a month. Technically speaking, you have until the age of access to sort it, right? Um, which is uh 55 at the moment and it’s going up to 57 in 2028. So it’s like important, even though it might not seem urgent. Yeah, totally, totally.

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