During the working lifetime of most people in the UK, we may well slog through as little as five different jobs, or as many as 20, meaning we have lots of pensions scattered about.

While some of these jobs will inevitably not have had a pension scheme (temporary work positions etc), many would have had you enrolled onto the pension scheme either by mandatory enrollment or from your request.

The Government estimate by 2050 that there could be £750 billion in lost workplace pensions!!

This could mean that many people will ultimately have unclaimed pension funds sitting around waiting to be cashed in, transferred to be improved upon or for those approaching retirement provide a much welcome boost to their income.

What is Pension Tracking?

Pension tracking is not a concept we are told enough about with increasing numbers of people getting complacent and not doing anything about unclaimed pension money sitting around.

There can be many reasons for this, the common ones are:

• Just to busy and not enough time or energy to get to today.
• Don’t know were to start.
• Believing that a small pension pot being to low to bother about.
• Thinking that it will be doing ok where it is – where ever that is!!

Pension tracing is not just  worthwhile exercise to undertake but could be one of the easiest ways to  find you a lot of hidden wealth locked into low performing pensions and pensions you completely forgotten about.

In many cases you do not have to wait until you are 65 before accessing your pension. Many company pensions allow you to cash in when you reach 55.  But wanting to retire early, and actually being able to afford to retire early, can be unrealistic.

Let’s say you are made aware of what your retirement income is likely to be, this may well help you to decide the ideal date or the actual date when you can retire comfortably.

It is now possible to amalgamate under performing pensions and pensions with contracts that have poor charges charges into one single pension plan that could see your money perform considerably better than where it may well be sitting now.

So, where do you start when you want to track down lost pensions or do a spot of pension tracing?

You could contact the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and ask for the Pensions Tracing team. It has more than 200,000 company schemes and personal pension plans on its books

Experians unclaimed asset register has a data base of million of records and has some success.

Alternatively, you could employ the services of pension tracking experts, like Equity SMART, who have over 20 years experience in all pension tracing and pension-related matters.

With just a few details about any pension schemes you had, some personal details and dates when you believed you contributed, they can also try to trace your pension details.

Once all the information has been collated, Equity SMART will provide you with a transfer analysis report giving you all the facts – figures  pros & cons and if right for you  transfer all under performing pensions into one brand new, single pension arrangement.

A little bit of pension tracing may unlock some valuable pension benefits – or a little unexpected lost treasure, at the end of the working life rainbow.